GERMANY  DEIY 
AND  ENGLAND  AFT"?. 
-THE  GUT,  ~EAX- 


a  rzr.cc  i;:.1.  r^r^ATiyz 


r^DERIC  WILLIAM  \'7i: 


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Underwood  and  Underwood.  N.  Y. 
Ambassador  Gerard. 


THE   ASSAULT 


Germany  Before  the  Outbreak  and 
England  in  War-Time 


A  Personal  Narrative 


By 
FREDERIC  WILLIAM  WILE 

Author  of  "Men  Around  the  Kaiser" 


ILLUSTRATED  WITH  PHOTOGRAPHS  AND  FACSIMILES  OF 
DOCUMENTS  AND  CARTOONS 


INDIANAPOLIS 

THE  BOBBS-MERRILL  COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 


COPYRIGHT   1916 
THE  BOBBS-MERR1LL  COMPANY 


PRESS  OF 

BRAUNWORTH  t>  CO. 

BOOK  MANUfACTURIRS 

BROOKLYN,  N.  V. 


To 
AMBASSADOR  AND  MRS.  GERARD 

LIFE-SAVERS 
IN  GRATITUDE 


INTRODUCTION 

This  is  not  a  "war  book."  It  has  not  been  my  privi- 
lege at  any  stage  of  the  Great  Blood-Letting  to  come 
into  close  contact  with  the  spectacular  clash  and  din  of 
the  fray.  Abler  pens  than  mine,  many  of  them  wielded 
by  the  "neutral"  hands  of  American  colleagues,  are 
immortalizing  the  terrible,  yet  irresistibly  fascinating, 
scenes  of  this  most  stupendous  drama.  But  every 
drama  has  its  scenario  and  its  prologue  and  its  behind- 
the-curtain  scenes — none  ever  written  was  so  rich  in 
these  preliminaries  and  accessories  as  is  Europe's  epic. 
To  have  witnessed  and  lived  through  some  of  these  was 
vouchsafed  me;  and  to  take  American  readers  with 
me  down  the  line  of  the  past  year's  recollections  and 
impressions  is  the  sole  object  of  this  unpretentious 
effort.  History,  Carlyle  said,  was  some  one's  record 
of  personal  experiences.  To  such  experiences,  as  far 
as  possible,  the  pages  of  this  book  are  confined. 

For  thirteen  years  to  the  week — I  have  always  had 
a  respectful  horror  of  thirteen — I  was  a  resident  of 
Berlin.  During  the  first  five  years  of  that  period 
my  identity  was  clear:  I  was  the  representative  in 
Germany  of  an  American  newspaper,  the  Chicago 
Daily  News.  But  in  1906  I  became  an  international 
complication,  for  it  was  then  I  joined  the  staff  of  the 
London  Daily  Mail,  which  converted  my  status  into 


INTRODUCTION 

that  of  an  American  serving  British  journalistic  inter- 
ests in  Germany.  It  was  not  long  afterward  that 
welcome  opportunity  presented  itself  to  renew  home 
professional  ties  in  connection  with  my  British  work, 
and  for  several  years  prior  to  the  outbreak  of  the  war 
I  carried  the  credentials  of  Berlin  correspondent  of  the 
New  York  Times  and  the  Chicago  Tribune.  They 
were  on  my  person,  with  my  United  States  passport, 
the  night  of  August  4,  1914,  when  the  Kaiser's  police 
arrested  me  as  an  "English  spy." 

I  feel  it  necessary  to  introduce  so  highly  personal  a 
narrative  with  these  details  in  order  to  make  plain,  at 
the  outset,  that  it  is  the  narrative  of  an  American 
born  and  bred.  My  proudest  boast  during  ten  years' 
association  with  Great  Britain's  premier  newspaper 
organization  was  that  I  never  lost  my  Americanism. 
My  English  editor,  on  the  occasion  of  my  earliest  phys- 
ical conflict  with  the  Mailed  Fist  in  Berlin,  doubtless 
recalls  taking  me  to  task  for  invoking  the  protection  of 
the  United  States  Embassy,  just  as  my  British  col- 
leagues, concerned  in  the  same  imbroglio,  had  invoked 
the  aid  of  their  Embassy.  Of  the  reams  I  have  written 
for  the  Daily  Mail  in  my  day,  I  never  sent  it  anything 
which  sprang  more  sincerely  from  the  heart  than  the 
message  to  its  editor  that  I  had  not  renounced  allegi- 
ance to  my  country  when  I  pledged  my  professional 
services  to  a  British  newspaper. 

I  have  no  higher  aspiration,  as  far  as  this  volume  is 
concerned,  than  that  critics  of  it,  hostile  or  friendly, 
may  pronounce  it  "pro-Ally"  from  start  to  finish.  I 
shall  survive  even  the  charge  that  it  is  "pro-English."  I 


INTRODUCTION 

mean  it  to  be  all  of  that,  as  I  have  tried  to  breathe  sin- 
cerity into  every  line  of  it.  But  I  shall  not  feel  inclined 
to  accept  without  protest  an  accusation  that  the  book 
is  "anti-German."  It  is  true  that  I  regard  this  essen- 
tially a  German-made,  or  rather  a  Prussian-made,  war, 
and  that  I  hold  Prussian  militarism  and  militarists 
solely  responsible  for  plunging  the  world  into  this  un- 
ending bath  of  blood  and  tears.  It  is  true  that  I  wish 
to  see  Germany  beaten.  I  wish  her  beaten  for  the  Al- 
lies' sake  and  for  my  own  country's  sake.  A  victorious 
Germany  would  be  a  menace  to  international  liberty 
and  become  automatically  a  threat  to  the  happiness  and 
freedom  of  the  United  States.  My  years  in  Germany 
taught  me  that.  But  I  cherish  no  scintilla  of  hatred  or 
animosity  toward  the  German  people  as  individuals, 
who  will  be  the  real  victims  of  the  war.  I  saw  them 
with  my  own  eyes  literally  dragged  into  the  fight 
against  their  will,  fears  and  judgment.  I  know  from 
their  own  lips  that  they  considered  it  a  cruelly  unnec- 
essary war  and  did  not  want  it.  They  were  joyful  and 
prosperous  a  year  and  a  half  ago — never  more  so. 
They  craved  a  continuance  of  the  simple  blessings  of 
peace,  unless  their  tearful  protestations  in  the  fateful 
month  preceding  the  drawing  of  their  mighty  sword 
were  the  plaints  of  a  race  of  hypocrites,  and  I  do  not 
think  the  percentage  of  hypocrisy  higher  in  Germany, 
man  for  man,  than  elsewhere  in  the  world.  The  Ger- 
man's Gott  strafe  England  cult,  for  example,  is  no 
revelation  to  any  man  who  has  lived  among  them. 
Their  hatred  for  Perfidious  Albion  has  long  been 
vigorous  and  purposeful. 


INTRODUCTION 

During  the  war  I  have  lived  in  Germany,  England 
and  the  United  States — a  week  of  it  in  Berlin,  three 
months  at  different  periods  in  America,  and  the  rest  of 
the  time  in  London.  My  observations  of  Germany 
have  not  been  confined  to  the  six  and  a  half  days  the 
Prussian  police  permitted  me  to  tarry  in  their  midst, 
for  my  work  in  London  has  dealt  almost  exclusively 
with  day-by-day  examination  of  that  weird  production 
which  will  be  known  to  history  as  the  German  war- 
time Press.  I  am  quite  sure  the  perspective  of  the  life 
and  times  of  the  Kaiser's  people  in  their  "great  hour" 
was  clearer  from  the  vantage-ground  of  a  newspaper 
desk  near  the  Thames  embankment  than  it  could  pos- 
sibly have  been  had  it  been  my  lot  to  view  the  Father- 
land at  war  as  an  observer  writing,  under  the  hypnotic 
influence  of  mass-suggestion,  of  Germany  from  within. 

Though  I  deal  with  Britain  in  war-time,  no  pretense 
is  made  of  treating  so  vast  a  subject  except  by  way  of 
fleeting  impressions.  Indeed,  nothing  but  snap-shots  of 
British  life  are  possible  at  the  moment,  so  kaleidoscopic 
are  its  developments  and  vagaries.  I  am  conscious 
that  the  pictures  I  have  drawn  are,  therefore,  superfi- 
cial, but  no  portrayal  of  a  people  in  a  state  of  flux 
could  well  be  otherwise.  Although  the  concluding 
chapters  were  written  in  October,  conditions  now  (in 
mid-December)  have  altered  vitally  in  many  direc- 
tions. Sir  John  French  no  longer  commands  the  Brit- 
ish Army  in  France  and  Flanders.  Serbia  has  gone 
the  way  of  Belgium.  Gallipoli  has  been  abandoned. 
The  Coalition  Governfnent,  established  at  the  end  of 
May,  is  widely  considered  a  failure  at  the  end  of 


INTRODUCTION 

December.  The  Man  in  the  Street,  that  oracle  of  all- 
wisdom  in  these  Isles,  is  asking  whether  the  war  can 
be  won  without  still  another,  and  more  sweeping, 
change  of  National  leadership. 

I  hope  my  British  friends,  and  particularly  my  pro- 
fessional colleagues  of  ten  years'  standing,  will  not  find 
my  snap-shots  too  under-exposed.  The  camera  was  in 
pro-British  hands  every  minute  of  the  time.  If  the 
pictures  appear  indistinct,  I  trust  the  photography  will 
at  least  not  be  criticized  as  in  any  respect  due  to  lack 
of  sympathy  with  the  British  cause. 

F.  W.  W. 

London,  December  20,  1915. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  PAGB 

I  The  Curtain  Raiser            ......  1 

II  The  First  Act 7 

III  The  Plot  Develops 15 

IV  The  Stage  Managers          .        .        .        .        .        .  28 

V  Slow  Music 48 

VI  The  Climax 63 

VII  War             79 

VIII  The  Americans            94 

IX  August  Fourth          .        .        .         .        .        .        .  109 

X  The  War  Reaches  Me        , 127 

XI  The  Last  Farewell 154 

XII  Safe  Conduct 175 

XIII  Complacency  Rules  the  Waves          ....  193 

XIV  Pro-Ally  Uncle  Sam 212 

XV  The  Helmsmen 227 

XVI  The  General,  the  Admiral  and  the  King          .        .  244 

XVII  "Your  King  and  Country  Want  You"    .        .        .  261 

XVIII  War  in  the  Dark 282 

XIX  The  Internal  Foe       .        .        .        .        .        .        .301 

XX  The  Empire  of  Hate          .        .        •.        .        ,..       ...  326 

XXI  The  New  England             348 

XXII  Quo    Vadis? 373 


THE  ASSAULT 


New  Introductory  Chapter 


HOW  EUROPE  VIEWS  AMERICAN   INTERVENTION 

IT  will  hardly  be  possible  for  any  faithful  chronicler 
of  that  transcendent  event  to  record  that  America's 
entry  into  the  war  set  embattled  Europe  by  the  ears. 
The  most  such  a  historian  can  say  of  the  impression 
created  in  Allied  countries  is  that  the  abandonment  of 
our  neutrality  toward  the  "natural  foe  to  liberty"  pro- 
duced profound  satisfaction  but  nothing  in  the  way  of 
a  staggering  sensation.  Even  in  Germany  and  among 
her  vassals,  declaration  of  war  by  the  United  States 
failed  to  provoke  consternation,  although  it  was  re- 
ceived in  a  spirit  of  nonchalance  which  was  more 
studied  than  real.  The  Damoclean  sword  of  Wash- 
ington had  hung  so  long  in  the  mid-air  of  indecision 
that  when  the  blow  fell  its  effect  was  to  a  large  extent 
lost  upon  beneficiary  and  victim  alike.  The  peoples 
who  became  our  Allies  were  gratified;  the  Germans 
mortified.  But  our  leap  into  the  arena  stained  with 
nearly  three  years  of  combatant  blood  was  so  belated 
that  it  seemed  bereft  of  the  power  to  plunge  either  our 
friends  into  paroxysms  of  enthusiasm  or  our  enemies 
into  the  depths  of  despair. 

I  am  speaking  exclusively  of  the  first  impressions 


ii  THE   ASSAULT 

generated  by  President  Wilson's  call  to  arms.  In  Al- 
lied Europe,  as  well  as  Germanic  Europe,  opinion  is 
changing,  now  that  the  words  of  April  are  merging 
into  the  deeds  of  midsummer.  Still  different  emotions 
will  fire  the  breasts  of  both  our  comrades-in-arms 
and  of  the  common  foe  when  the  full  magnitude  of 
American  intervention  dawns  upon  their  reluctant  con- 
sciousness. As  yet  the  illimitable  import  of  America's 
"coming  in"  is  only  faintly  realized.  Europe's  attitude 
toward  the  new  belligerent  is  too  strongly  intrenched  in 
decade-old  disbelief  in  the  existence  of  American  ideal- 
ism and  in  gross  ignorance  of  our  actual  potentialities 
for  war,  spiritual  as  well  as  physical,  to  be  lightly 
abandoned.  We  shall  have  to  win  our  spurs.  There 
is  at  this  writing  no  inclination  whatever  to  present 
them  to  us  on  trust. 

In  the  introduction  to  the  original  edition  of  The 
Assault,  which  was  completed  at  the  end  of  1915,  I 
was  un-neutral  enough  to  utter  the  pious  hope  that 
Germany  would  be  beaten.  I  confessed  to  the  creed 
that  "a  victorious  Germany  would  be  a  menace  to  inter- 
national liberty  and  become  automatically  a  threat  to 
the  happiness  and  freedom  of  the  United  States."  I 
said  that  "my  years  in  Germany  taught  me  that" — 
years  lived  in  closest  contact  with  Prussian  militarism 
long  before  it  had  taken  the  concrete  form  of  savagery 
at  sea.  With  that  passion  for  corroboration  of  his 
own  prejudices  and  predictions,  which  is  inherent  in 
the  average  man,  and  which  dominates  most  writers, 
I  rejoice  to  feel  that  our  government  and  country  have 
at  length  joined  in  liberty's  fray  from  the  identical  mo- 
tives which  induced  me  at  the  outset  to  take  the  only 
side  that  it  seemed  possible  for  an  American  to  espouse. 


AMERICAN    INTERVENTION  iii 

Properly  to  analyze  Europe's  mentality  in  respect  of 
the  United  States'  entry  into  the  war  we  need  to  bear 
in  mind  that  for  the  thirty-two  preceding  months 
President  Wilson  was  the  riddle  of  the  political  uni- 
verse. Europe  had  been  assured  ceaselessly  since  Au- 
gust, 1914,  that  America  was  overwhelmingly  and 
irretrievably  pro-Ally,  though  its  confidence  in  such 
assertions  was  shipwrecked  when  we  failed  to  go  to 
war  over  the  Lusitania  incident  and  was  never  fully  re- 
stored. Not  even  Berlin  could  reconcile  the  Washing- 
ton government's  invincible  neutrality  with  the  alleged 
existence  of  universal  counter-sentiment.  Europeans 
are  educated  to  believe  that  public  opinion  is  the  only 
monarch  to  whom  the  American  citizenry  owns  alle- 
giance. They  were  unable  to  comprehend  a  president 
who  so  resolutely  refused  to  bow  to  the  people's  sov- 
ereign will.  In  its  myopic  misconception  of  American 
conditions,  Allied  Europe  indulged  in  grotesque  mis- 
interpretation of  Mr.  Wilson's  hesitancy  and  mystic 
diplomacy.  He  had  been  "re-elected  by  German 
votes."  In  London  Americans  were  solemnly  asked 
if  the  true  explanation  of  his  policy  did  not  lie  in 
the  fact  that  he  had  "a  German  wife!"  It  was  also 
mooted  that  he  had  "a  secret  understanding"  with 
Count  Bernstorff.  The  president  was  this,  that  and 
the  other  thing — everything,  in  fact,  except  what  he 
ought  to  be.  No  American  chief  magistrate  since  Lin- 
coln was  ever  so  magnificently  misunderstood,  none  so 
incorrigibly  maligned. 

Thus  it  was  that  although  the  United  States'  action 
under  President  Wilson's  sagacious  leadership  did  not 
fill  Europe  with  either  animation  or  excitement,  it 
nevertheless  came  as  a  full-fledged  surprise  to  both  sets 


iv  [THE   ASSAULT 

of  belligerents.  Briton,  Frenchman,  Russian  and  Ital- 
ian, as  well  as  German,  Austrian  and  Hungarian,  each 
in  his  own  dogmatic  way,  had  long  since  and  definitely 
made  up  their  minds  that  America  did  not  mean  to 
fight.  Their  cocksureness  on  this  cardinal  point  was 
not  unnaturally  supported  by  the  circumstances  of 
President  Wilson's  re-election  on  what  was  commonly 
understood  to  be  the  democratic  candidate's  paramount 
campaign  issue — his  success  in  keeping  the  country  out 
of  the  war.  In  the  two  or  three  days  in  which  Mr. 
Wilson's  fate  trembled  in  the  balance  of  the  Electoral 
College,  a  London  newspaper,  venting  splenitic  feel- 
ings long  pent  up,  gratefully  acclaimed  the  premature 
announcement  of  Mr.  Hughes'  triumph  as  an  historic 
and  deserved  rebuke  of  the  statesman  who  was  "too 
proud  to  fight." 

Within  a  month  President  Wilson,  in  his  first  public 
utterance  since  election  day,  made  his  "peace-without- 
victory"  address  to  the  Senate.  This  cryptic  deliver- 
ance was  interpreted  in  Allied  Europe  as  not  only 
obliterating  all  possibility  of  America's  entering  the 
war  against  Germany,  but  as  actually  promoting  Ger- 
many's efforts,  launched  about  the  same  time,  to  secure 
a  premature,  or  "German,"  peace.  There  was  prob- 
ably no  time  during  the  entire  war  when  feeling  against 
the  president  and  the  United  States  in  general  ran 
higher  in  England  and  France  than  during  the  ensuing 
weeks.  It  was  not  so  much  what  one  read  in  the  public 
prints,  for  press  utterances  were  restrained  if  not  un- 
qualifiedly friendly,  that  impelled  many  an  American 
in  London  and  Paris  to  seek  cover  from  the  withering 
blast  of  criticism  and  impatience  to  which  he  now 
found  his  country  subjected.    It  was  rather  the  senti- 


AMERICAN   INTERVENTION  v 

ments  encountered  among  Englishmen  and  Frenchmen 
in  private  that  supplied  the  real  index  to,  and  revealed 
the  full  intensity  of,  the  disappointment  and  indigna- 
tion now  aroused  in  Allied  lands. 

Indelibly  impressed  upon  my  memory  is  the  passion- 
ate outburst  of  a  dear — and,  of  course,  temperamental 
— French  friend  in  London.  He  is  a  gentleman,  a 
scholar  and  sincere  lover  of  America,  where  he  found 
the  charming  lady  who  is  now  his  wife.  He  had  re- 
tired to  a  bed  of  illness  in  consequence  of  the  climatic 
iniquities  which  will  forever  make  it  impossible  for 
a  Frenchman  ever  really  to  like  England,  and  I  was 
paying  him  a  neighborly  visit  of  inquiry.  Though  I 
had  hoped  and  intended  that  the  acrimonious  topic  of 
America  would  for  once  be  eliminated  from  our  con- 
versation, I  was  not  to  be  spared  what  turned  out  to  be 
almost  the  most  violent  castigation  of  the  United 
States  and  all  its  works  under  which  I  could  ever  re- 
member to  have  winced.  I  was  left  in  no  doubt  that  his 
outpouring  of  righteous  Gallic  wrath,  though  it  sprang 
to  a  certain  degree  from  temperature  as  well  as  tem- 
perament, was  the  voice  of  France  crying  out  in  holy 
anger  with  the  great  but  recreant  sister  republic.  Wil- 
son had  "surrendered  to  the  Germans  and  pro-Ger- 
mans." They  were  now  getting  their  reward.  The 
president  was  "playing  the  Kaiser's  peace  game."  He 
may  not  have  meant  to  do  so,  but  that  is  what  his  Sen- 
ate manifesto  amounted  to,  in  French  estimation. 
"The  Americans  care  only  for  their  money."  So  be  it. 
France  would  not  forget.  Jamais!  Americans  would 
rue  the  day  they  had  sent  back  to  the  White  House 
the  man  who  was  now  stabbing  crucified  democracy  in 
the  back ! 


vi  THE   ASSAULT 

The  essential  difference  between  the  French  and  the 
English  is  that  Frenchmen  usually  say  what  they  feel, 
and  Englishmen  feel  what  they  do  not  say.  Emotions 
were  given  to  Frenchmen  to  be  expressed ;  to  English- 
men, to  be  suppressed.  Almost  identically  the  same 
emotions  which  fired  the  French  soul,  as  typified  by 
the  instance  I  have  just  cited,  filled  British  breasts,  but 
owing  to  the  psychic  machinery  with  which  his  organ- 
ism is  equipped  the  Englishman  was  able  more  suc- 
cessfully to  stifle  them.  The  public  tone  toward  the 
latest  manifestation  of  our  "war  policy"  was  punc- 
tiliously correct.  It  was  discussed  by  the  great  news- 
papers in  terms  of  polite  dismay  but  almost  invariably 
in  good  temper.  Yet  millions  of  Britons  were  boiling 
within,  and  if  wearing  their  hearts  on  their  sleeves 
had  been  "good  form,"  there  is  little  reason  to  doubt 
that  their  ebullitions  would  have  been  no  less  articulate 
or  meaningful  than  those  of  my  distinguished  French 
friend  herein  narrated. 

It  was  about  at  this  time,  the  end  of  1916,  that  an 
American  colleague,  Edward  Price  Bell,  of  The  Chi- 
cago Daily  News,  set  forth  in  the  columns  of  The 
Times  upon  a  bold  adventure — an  attempt  to  persuade 
captious  Britons  that,  far  from  desiring  to  "play  the 
Kaiser's  game,"  President  Wilson  was  actually  anxious 
to  make  war  on  Germany,  and,  indeed,  was  delib- 
erately, as  was  his  way,  proceeding  in  that  direction. 
It  was  a  risky  throw  for  the  doyen  of  the  American 
press  in  London,  who  enjoyed  a  reputation  for  sanity 
and  sagacity  and  who  had  good  reason  for  desiring  to 
preserve  the  respect  of  a  community  in  which  his  pro- 
fessional lot  had  been  cast  for  sixteen  years.  I  pur- 
pose summarizing  the  course  of  Bell's  effort  to  scale 


AMERICAN    INTERVENTION  vii 

the  walls  of  British  prejudice  because  of  its  immensely 
symptomatic  and  psychological  interest. 

"I  believe  that  Wilson  wants  to  go  to  war,"  Bell 
wrote  to  The  Times  on  December  23.  "I  believe  that 
he  wants  to  fight  Germany.  I  believe  that  he  wants 
Germany  to  commit  herself  to  a  program  that  would 
warrant  him  in  asking  the  American  people  to  enter  the 
conflict."  In  every  allied  quarter  in  Europe,  prac- 
tically without  exception,  Bell's  letter  produced  a 
prodigious  and  contemptuous  guffaw.  Americans  in 
Europe,  any  number  of  them,  joined  in  the  gibes.  Un- 
dismayed, Bell  returned  to  the  attack  within  three  days. 
"America  can  not  keep  out  of  this  war  unless  Germany 
gives  way,"  he  wrote  on  December  26.  "The  time 
may  come  very  soon  when  President  Wilson  will  be 
under  the  necessity  of  making  his  appeal  to  the  Ameri- 
can nation."  The  thunderer  did  not  consign  Bell's 
letters  to  the  editorial  waste-basket,  where  most  Eng- 
lishmen believed  they  belonged,  yet  it  declined,  in  its 
scrupulously  courteous  way,  to  associate  itself  with 
its  correspondent's  manifestly  fantastic  and  fanatical 
sophistry.  In  an  editorial  comment  The  Times  ex- 
pressed its  reluctance  to  place  any  trust  in  Bell's  expo- 
sition of  the  policy  "which  Mr.  Wilson  so  carefully 
wraps  up."  Bell  had  by  this  time  become  a  laughing- 
stock far  beyond  the  confines  of  the  metropolitan  area 
of  London.  Paris,  Petrograd  and  Rome  read  his  let- 
ters and  shook  with  incredulous  mirth.  The  feelings 
of  fellow- Americans  toward  him  began  to  be  tinged 
with  pity. 

Yet  Bell  broke  forth  afresh  on  New  Year's  Day  with 
his  third  letter  to  Printing  House  Square,  asserting, 
roundly,  that  "America  will  and  can  support  no  peace 


Viii  THE    ASSAULT 

but  an  Entente  peace."  On  January  25  The  Times 
printed  Bell's  fourth  letter  within  five  weeks,  in  which 
he  this  time  declared  unequivocally  that  "Mr.  Wil- 
son's purpose  is  solely  to  inform  the  world  what 
America  stands  for  and  what  he  is  willing  to  ask 
America,  if  need  be,  to  fight  for." 

Germany  now  proclaimed  her  new  policy  of  unre- 
stricted submarine  warfare.  Mr.  Gerard  was  recalled 
from  Berlin  and  Count  Bernstorff  received  his  pass- 
ports in  Washington.  Yet  Allied  faith  in  America, 
momentarily  revived  by  these  events,  took  wings  once 
more  when  it  became  known  that  Mr.  Wilson's  next 
"step"  would  be  armed  neutrality.  The  editor  of  The 
Times,  who  had  been  exceptionally  tolerant  of  the  pes- 
tiferous Bell,  imagined  now,  I  fancy,  that  events  had 
at  length  put  a  timely  end  to  the  letter-writing  energies 
of  the  Chicago  scribe;  for  Englishmen,  with  notably 
few  exceptions,  had  by  this  time  pretty  well  "elim- 
inated" America  from  their  calculations.  But  on  Feb- 
ruary 22,  inspired  perhaps  by  the  rugged  traditions 
clinging  to  that  date,  Bell  cleared  for  action  for  the 
fifth  time  and  next  day  The  Times  printed  him  for 
the  fifth  time.  He  wrote :  "I  will  risk  the  view  that 
we  are  on  the  edge  of  great  things  in  America — things 
worthy  of  the  country  of  Washington  and  Lincoln. 
America,  I  feel,  is  about  to  fructify  internationally — 
about  to  make  her  real  contribution  to  humanity  and 
history."  The  Times  now  went  so  far  as  to  suggest, 
with  characteristic  prudence,  that  Bell's  "sagacious  and 
racy  letter  deserves  careful  consideration  by  all  who 
are  trying  to  understand  the  situation  in  Washing- 
ton."   Unhappily,  there  was  little  evidence  in  the  con- 


AMERICAN    INTERVENTION  ix 

tinued  British  mistrust  of  America  that  The  Times' 
counsel  was  being  taken  widely  to  heart. 

On  February  27  Bell  craved  the  indulgence  of  The 
Times  for  his  sixth,  and  final,  epistle  to  the  skeptics. 
With  what  was  destined  to  turn  out  to  be  rare  pre- 
science and  penetration,  he  now  said  that  Mr.  Wilson's 
delay  in  coming  to  grips  with  Hohenzollernism  meant 
only  that  "the  president  wants  the  public  temper  so 
hot  throughout  America  that  it  will  instantly  burn  to 
ash  any  revolutionary  unrest  or  any  opposition  by  the 
pacifist  diehards."  Five  weeks  later  the  United  States 
and  Germany  were  at  war,  with  the  American  nation 
united  in  fervent  support  of  the  president's  pronuncia- 
mento  that  the  task  which  demanded  the  renunciation 
of  our  neutrality  was  one  to  which  "we  can  dedicate 
our  lives,  our  fortunes,  everything  we  are  and  every- 
thing we  have."  The  hour  of  Europe's  awakening 
from  its  scornful  dreams  had  come. 

For  several  days  after  Congress,  at  the  president's 
instigation,  voted  to  "accept  the  gage  of  battle,"  there 
lay  neatly  folded  up  in  a  certain  front  room  of  the 
American  Embassy  in  London  a  fine,  new  American 
flag.  It  had  been  put  there  for  a  special  purpose — to  be 
hoisted  at  a  psychological  moment  believed  to  be  im- 
minent. Our  people  in  Grosvenor  Gardens,  in  their 
hearty,  imaginative  American  way,  considered  that 
there  might  possibly  be  a  "demonstration"  in  welcome 
of  Britain's  latest  comrade-in-arms.  There  were 
visions  of  a  procession,  brass  bands  and  cheering 
crowds;  and  the  spick  and  span  stars  and  stripes  were 
to  be  flung  to  the  glad  breeze  when  the  "demonstrators" 
reached  the  scene  and  called  for  a  speech  from  Am- 


x  THE    ASSAULT 

bassador  Page  on  the  Embassy  balcony.  Such  things 
happened  when  Italy  and  Roumania  "came  in."  Surely 
history  would  not  fail  to  repeat  itself  in  the  case  of 
"daughter  America."  But  neither  procession,  bands, 
cheers  nor  crowds  ever  materialized.  After  all,  we 
could  not  expect  Englishmen  to  celebrate  in  honor  of 
the  greatest  mistake  they  had  ever  made  in  their  lives. 
That  would  be  something  more  than  un-English.  It 
would  be  a  violation  of  all  the  laws  of  human  nature. 
Yet  I  suppose  there  was  not  an  American  in  Great 
Britain  who  was  not  keenly  disappointed  at  the  con- 
spicuously undemonstrative  character  of  our  welcome 
into  the  Allied  fold.  I  must  not  be  understood  as  min- 
imizing the  warmth  of  either  governmental  or  press 
utterances  evoked  by  President  Wilson's  Lincolnesque 
speech  to  Congress  and  the  action  which  so  promptly 
ensued.  The  sentiments  expressed  by  Mr.  Lloyd 
George,  Mr.  Asquith,  Mr.  Bonar  Law,  Lord  Robert 
Cecil  and  Lord  Bryce,  in  and  out  of  Parliament,  and 
the  thoughts  which  found  vivid  expression  in  the  col- 
umns of  the  newspapers  of  London  and  the  provinces 
left  little  to  be  desired ;  but  eloquent  and  hearty  as  they 
were,  their  effect  upon  that  all-powerful  molder  of 
British  public  opinion  known  as  the  Man  in  the  Street 
was  strangely  negligible.  I  am  sure  I  am  not  the  only 
American  in  England  who,  waiting  for  words  of 
greeting  from  British  friends  and  not  getting  them, 
was  irresistibly  constrained  to  search  for  the  reason. 
Our  chagrin  was  not  lessened  by  assurances  from 
Paris  that  "France  was  going  wild  with  joy" ;  that  the 
president's  speech  was  being  read  aloud  in  the  schools 
and  officially  placarded  on  all  the  hoardings  of  the  re- 
public; that  the  government  buildings  were  flying  the 


AMERICAN    INTERVENTION  xi 

tricolor  and  "Old  Glory"  side  by  side;  and  that  Ameri- 
can men  were  being  publicly  embraced  in  the  boule- 
vards. 

Many  Americans  found  themselves,  for  reasons 
never  entirely  clear  to  them,  the  objects  of  "congratula- 
tion." I  know  of  at  least  one  instance  in  which  a  very 
estimable  American  lady,  showered  with  "congratula- 
tions" by  British  friends  on  the  action  of  her  country, 
preserved  sufficient  presence  of  mind  to  suggest  that 
she  thought  "congratulations"  were  due  to  the  Allies. 
Another  favorite  view  advanced  by  vox  populi  was 
that  America  had  only  "come  in"  at  this  late  stage  of 
the  sanguinary  game  because  "the  war  was  won"  and 
intervention  now  was  "safe"  and  "cheap."  It  was  not 
uncommon  to  be  told  that  our  determination  to  "spend 
the  whole  force  of  the  nation"  was  due  to  commercial 
acumen  and  our  desire  to  safeguard  the  heavy  "invest- 
ment" we  had  already  made  in  the  Allied  cause.  Last- 
ditchers — their  name  was  legion :  the  Englishmen  who 
refused  to  believe  even  yet  that  America  "meant  busi- 
ness"— declined  to  throw  their  hats  into  the  air  and 
shout  until  "big  words"  had  become  "big  deeds." 
Much  more  impressive  in  my  own  ears  seemed  the  ex- 
planation that  Britons  were  not  tumultuous  in  our 
honor  because  these  days  of  endless  sacrifice — the 
spring  offensive  in  France  was  at  its  height  and  the 
nation's  best  were  falling  in  thousands — were  not  days 
for  cheering  and  flag-waving.  And,  finally,  there  was 
that  extensive  school  of  thought  which  had  always 
and  sincerely  opposed  American  intervention  on  the 
ground  that  America,  as  a  neutral  granary  and  arsenal, 
was  a  more  effective  Allied  asset  than  a  belligerent 
America  which  would  naturally  and  necessarily  hus- 


xii  THE   ASSAULT 

band  its  vast  resources  for  its  own  military  require- 
ments. 

The  story  of  Germany's  state  of  mind  toward 
America's  entry  into  the  lists  against  her  is  soon  told. 
The  German  government  and  German  people  looked 
upon  us  as  all  but  declared  enemies  throughout  the 
war.  They  felt,  and  repeatedly  said,  that  we  were  do- 
ing them  quite  as  much  damage  as  neutrals  as  we 
could  possibly  inflict  in  the  guise  of  belligerents.  That, 
indeed,  was  the  argument  on  which  Hindenburg  and 
his  fellow-strategists  based  the  "safety"  of  inaugurat- 
ing unrestricted  submarine  warfare  and  the  moral  cer- 
tainty of  war  with  the  United  States  as  a  result.  Not 
all  Germans  blithely  relegated  the  prospect  of  a  for- 
mally hostile  America  to  the  realm  of  inconsequence. 
Hindenburg  and  Ludendorff  know  nothing  about 
America.  But  men  like  Ballin,  Gwinner,  Rathenau 
and  Dernburg  know  that  the  United  States,  in  a  fa- 
mous German  idiom,  is,  indeed,  "the  land  of  unlimited 
possibilities."  There  can  be  no  manner  of  doubt  that 
the  vision  of  America's  limitless  resources  harnessed 
to  those  of  the  nations  already  at  war  with  their  coun- 
try always  filled  the  business  giants  of  the  Fatherland 
with  all  the  terror  of  a  nightmare.  But  as  those  ele- 
ments, both  before  and  during  the  war,  were  as  a 
voice  crying  in  the  wilderness  of  Prussian  militarism, 
they  were  condemned  to  silence  when  the  dreaded 
thing  became  a  reality;  and  the  only  note  that  issued 
forth  from  Berlin  was  the  "inspired"  croak  in  the 
government-controlled  press  that  only  the  expected 
had  happened ;  that  Hindenburg' s  plans  had  been  made 
with  exact  regard  for  that  which  had  now  super- 
vened, and  that  Germany's  irresistible  march  to  victory 


AMERICAN    INTERVENTION  xiii 

would  not  and  could  not  be  arrested  by  anything  the 
Americans  could  do. 

Doubts  were  universally  expressed  in  America  and 
in  Allied  Europe  as  to  whether  the  Kaiser's  govern- 
ment would  permit  President  Wilson's  crushing  indict- 
ment of  Prussianism  to  be  published  in  Germany.  One 
heard  of  picturesque  schemes  to  drop  millions  of  copies 
of  the  speech  over  the  German  trenches  and  towns 
from  aeroplanes.  In  at  least  one  widely-read  German 
newspaper,  the  Berliner  Tageblatt,  a  Radical-Liberal 
journal  which  has  not  entirely  surrendered  its  old- 
time  independence,  the  president's  speech  was  printed 
almost  verbatim.  In  nearly  every  paper  there  were 
adequate  extracts.  But  such  effect  as  they  may  have 
been  designed  to  create  upon  the  German  body  politic 
— particularly  the  president's  insistence  that  America's 
war  is  with  "the  Imperial  German  Government"  and 
not  with  "the  German  people" — was  nullified  by  the 
press  bureau's  imperious  orders  to  editors  to  reject 
Mr.  Wilson's  "moral  clap-trap"  as  impudent  and  in- 
solent interference  with  Germany's  domestic  concerns. 
Under  the  leadership  of  the  celebrated  Berlin  theolo- 
gian, Professor  Doctor  Adolf  Harnack,  meetings  of 
German  scholars  and  savants  were  organized  for  the 
purpose  of  giving  public  expression  to  the  "unanimity 
and  indignation  with  which  the  German  nation  protests 
against  the  American  president's  officious  intrusion 
upon  matters  which  are  the  affair  of  the  German  people 
and  themselves  alone."    Or  words  to  that  effect. 

Meantime  the  so-called  comic  press  of  Germany, 
which  to  an  extent  probably  unknown  in  any  other 
country  of  the  world  gives  the  keynote  for  popular 
sentiment,  engaged  in  an  orgy  of  unbridled  abuse  of 


xiv  THE   ASSAULT 

President  Wilson,  the  United  States  and  Americans  in 
general.  The  leitmotif  of  hundreds  of  cartoons,  carica- 
tures and  jokes  was  that  the  "American  money  power" 
had  "dragged"  us  into  the  war.  Simplicissimus  epito- 
mized German  thoughts  of  the  moment  in  a  full-page 
drawing  entitled  "High  Finance  Crowning  Wilson 
Autocrat  of  America  by  the  Grace  of  Mammon."  The 
president  was  depicted  enthroned  upon  a  dais  resting 
on  bulging  money-bags  and  surmounted  by  a  canopy 
fringed  with  gold  dollars.  A  crown  of  shells  and  cart- 
ridges is  being  placed  upon  his  head  by  the  grinning 
shade  of  the  late  J.  Pierpont  Morgan.  In  the  back- 
ground is  the  filmy  outline  of  George  Washington, 
delivering  the  farewell  address. 

Then,  of  a  sudden,  German  press  policy  toward  the 
United  States  underwent  a  radical  change.  Silence 
supplanted  abuse.  It  became  so  oppressive  and  so 
profound  as  to  be  eloquent.  The  purpose  of  this  or- 
ganized indifference  soon  became  crystal-clear :  on  the 
one  hand  to  bolster  up  German  confidence  in  the  innoc- 
uousness  of  American  enmity,  and,  on  the  other,  to 
slacken  the  United  States'  war  preparations  by  commit- 
ting no  "overt  act"  of  word  or  deed  designed  to  stim- 
ulate them.  Bernstorff  had  by  this  time  reached  Ber- 
lin and  there  is  reason  to  suspect  that  his  was  the 
crafty  hand  directing  the  new  policy  of  ostensible  dis- 
interestedness in  American  belligerency.  The  arrival 
of  American  naval  forces  in  European  waters;  the 
inauguration  of  conscription ;  the  far-reaching  prepara- 
tions for  succoring  our  Allies  with  money,  food  and 
ships;  the  splendid  success  of  the  Liberty  Loan;  the 
presence  of  General  Pershing  and  the  headquarters 
staff  of  the  United  States  Army  in  France;  the  enroll- 


AMERICAN    INTERVENTION  xv 

ment  of  nearly  ten  million  young  men  for  military 
service ;  our  ambitious  plans  for  the  air  war ;  the  gird- 
ing up  of  our  loins  in  every  conceivable  direction,  that 
we  may  play  a  worthy  part  in  the  war — all  these  things 
have  been  either  deliberately  ignored  in  Germany,  by 
imperious  government  order,  or,  when  not  altogether 
suppressed  from  public  knowledge,  been  slurred  or 
glossed  over  in  a  way  designed  to  make  them  appear 
as  harmless  or  "bluff."  Finally,  in  an  "inspired"  ar- 
ticle which  offered  sheer  affront  to  the  large  body  of 
truly  patriotic  American  citizens  of  German  extraction, 
the  Cologne  Gazette  bade  Germans  to  continue  to  pin 
their  faith  in  "our  best  allies,"  i.  e.,  the  German- Ameri- 
cans, who  might  be  relied  upon  (quoth  the  semi-official 
Watch  on  the  Rhine)  to  "inject  into  American  public 
opinion  an  element  of  restraint  and  circumspection 
which  has  already  often  been  a  cause  of  embarrass- 
ment to  Herr  Wilson  and  his  English  friends."  "We 
may  be  sure,"  concluded  this  impudent  homily,  "that 
our  compatriots  are  still  at  their  post." 

Events  have  marched  fast  since  America  "came  in." 
In  Great  Britain  and  France  men  of  perspicacity  are 
not  quite  so  jubilant  over  the  effects  of  the  Russian 
revolution  as  they  were  three  months  ago.  They 
realize  that  the  amazing  cataclysm  which  began  in 
Petrograd  on  March  13  warded  off  a  treacherous  peace 
between  Romanoff  and  Hohenzollern,  but  also,  alas! 
that  it  has  effectually  eliminated  Russia  as  a  fighting 
factor  for  the  purposes  of  this  year's  campaign.  Eng- 
lishmen and  Frenchmen  are  only  now  beginning  to 
comprehend  the  immeasurable  task  that  confronts  New 
Russia  in  the  erection  of  a  democratic  state  on  the 
ruins  of  autocracy  while  faced  by  the  simultaneous 


xvi  THE    ASSAULT 

necessity  of  warring  against  an  enemy  in  occupation 
of  vast  Russian  territory. 

To-day  there  is  little  inclination  in  London  or  Paris 
to  underestimate  the  providential  importance  of  Ameri- 
can intervention.  The  specter  of  dwindling  man- 
power in  both  countries  is  of  itself  sufficient  to  cause 
them  to  gaze  gratefully  and  longingly  toward  our  un- 
tapped reservoir  of  human  sinews.  What  is  happening 
in  chaotic  and  liberty-dazed  Russia  forces  Englishmen 
and  Frenchmen,  however  disconcerting  to  their  pride, 
to  acknowledge  the  absolute  indispensability  of  Ameri- 
can support.  There  are  many  among  them  candid 
enough  to  admit  that  democracy's  horizon  might  now 
be  perilously  beclouded  if  the  United  States  had  re- 
frained from  playing  a  man's  part  in  the  battle  of 
the  nations.  In  Berlin,  too,  the  true  import  of 
America's  decision  is  dawning  upon  government  and 
governed  alike. 

Our  Allies  expect  us  to  justify  our  world-wide  rep- 
utation for  speed  and  organizing  capacity  and  to  trans- 
fer our  activities  from  the  forum  of  Demosthenes  to 
the  field  of  Mars.  They  are  impressed  by  what  we 
have  already  accomplished — I  write  on  the  day  when 
the  arrival  of  the  first  American  army  in  France,  well 
within  three  months  of  our  entering  the  war,  is  offi- 
cially announced.  But  amid  our  remote  isolation  from 
the  scene  of  the  conflict,  safeguarded  by  geographical 
guarantees  that  its  consuming  fires  can  hardly  ever 
sear  our  own  soil,  Englishmen  and  Frenchmen  won- 
der whether  we  are  able  to  estimate  the  magnitude  of 
the  effort  required  of  us  if  we  are  to  rise  to  the  ma- 
jestic zenith  of  our  potentialities.     Some  of  them, 


AMERICAN    INTERVENTION         xvii 

seemingly  no  wiser  for  their  myopia  of  recent  times, 
are  frankly  skeptical  on  that  point. 

It  is  our  bounden  duty,  as  I  am  sure  it  is  our  un- 
conquerable resolve,  to  disillusion  our  Allies.  To  us 
has  fallen  the  privilege  of  proving  that  our  mighty 
sword  has  been  drawn  in  earnest  and  that  we  shall  not 
sheathe  it  until  America's  plighted  word  is  gloriously 
made  good.  "Make  Good !"  Leaping  to  the  tasks 
which  await  us  on  land  and  sea  with  that  indigenous 
idiom  on  their  lips,  our  soldiers  and  sailors  need  crave 
for  no  more  inspiring  slogan.  Allied  Europe  expects 
us — expects  us  almost  anxiously — to  "make  good." 

London,  June  28,  1917. 


THE  ASSAULT 

CHAPTER  I 

THE   CURTAIN   RAISER 

COUNTESS  HANNAH  VON  BISMARCK 
missed  her  aim.  The  beribboned  bottle  of 
"German  champagne"  with  which  she  meant  truly 
well  to  baptize  the  newest  Hamburg-American  levia- 
than of  sixty  thousand-odd  tons  on  the  placid  Satur- 
day afternoon  of  June  20,  1914,  went  far  wide  of  its 
mark.  The  Kaiser,  impetuous  and  resourceful,  came 
gallantly  and  instantaneously  to  the  rescue.  Grabbing 
the  bottle  while  it  still  swung  unbroken  in  midair  by  the 
black-white-red  silken  cord  which  suspended  it  from 
the  launching  pavilion,  Imperial  William  crashed  it 
with  accuracy  and  propelling  power  a  Marathon  jave- 
lin-thrower might  have  envied  squarely  against  the 
vast  bow.  The  granddaughter  of  the  Iron  Chancellor, 
a  bit  crestfallen  because  she  had  only  thrown  like  any 
woman  exclaimed:  "I  christen  thee,  great  ship,  Bis- 
marck!" and  the  milky  foam  of  the  Schaumwein 
trickled  in  rivulets  down  the  nine-  or  ten-story  side  of 
the  most  Brobdingnagian  product  which  ever  sprang 
from  shipwrights'  hands.  Then,  with  ten  thousand 
awestruck  others  gathered  there  on  the  Elbe  side,  I 

1 


2  THE   ASSAULT 

watched  the  huge  steel  carcass,  released  at  last  from 
the  stocks  which  had  so  long  held  it  prisoner,  glide 
and  creak  majestically  down  the  greasy  ways  midst 
our  chanting  of  Deutschland,  Deutschland,  uber 
Alles.  Half  a  minute  later  the  Bismarck  was  rest- 
ing serenely,  house-high,  on  the  surface  of  the  murky 
river  five  hundred  yards  away.  The  Kaiser  and  Herr 
Ballin  shook  hands  feelingly,  the  royal  monarch  smil- 
ing benignly  on  the  shipping  king.  The  military  band 
blared  forth  Heil  Dir  im  Siegeskranz,  and  the  last 
fete  Hamburg  was  destined  to  know  for  many  a 
troublous  month  had  passed  into  history. 

Countess  von  Bismarck  had  missed  her  aim!  I 
wonder  if  there  are  not  many,  like  myself,  who  wit- 
nessed the  ill-omened  launch  and  who  endow  it  now 
with  a  meaning  which  events  of  the  intervening  year 
have  borne  out  ?  For,  surely,  when  the  Great  General 
Staff  at  Berlin  reviews  dispassionately  the  beginnings 
of  the  war,  as  it  some  day  will  do,  there  will  be  an 
absorbingly  interesting  explanation  of  how  the  ma- 
chine which  Moltke,  the  Organizer  of  Victory,  handed 
down  to  an  incompetent  namesake  and  nephew  missed 
its  aim,  too — the  winning  of  the  war  by  a  series  of 
short,  sharp  and  staggering  blows  which  should  decide 
the  issue  in  favor  of  the  Germans  before  the  next  snow. 
The  argument  has  been  advanced,  in  vindication  of 
Germany's  innocent  intentions,  that  the  Hamburg- 
American  line  would  never  have  launched  the  mighty 
Bismarck  if  the  Fatherland  was  planning  or  contem- 
plating war.  But  the  ship  was  not  to  have  made  her 
maiden  transatlantic  voyage  until  April  1,  1915,  the 
centenary  of  her  great  patronym's  birth.  The  German 
Staff  expected  to  dictate  a  glorious  peace  long  before 


THE    CURTAIN    RAISER  3 

that  time,  and  might  have  done  so  but  for  Belgium, 
Joffre,  "that  contemptible  little  British  army,"  and 
other  miscalculations.  If  the  Staff,  like  Countess  von 
Bismarck,  had  not  missed  its  aim,  the  Bismarck  would 
have  poked  her  gigantic  nose  into  New  York  harbor 
on  scheduled  time,  a  mammoth  symbol  of  Germany, 
the  World  Power  indeed,  and  fitting  incarnation  of 
the  new  Mistress  of  the  Seas.  Who  knows  but  what 
perhaps  grandiose  visions  of  that  sort  were  in  the  far- 
seeing  Herr  Ballin's  card-index  mind? 

The  Kaiser  customarily  visits  the  Venice  of  the 
North  on  his  way  to  Kiel  Week,  the  yachting  festival 
invented  by  him  to  outrival  England's  Cowes,  and 
the  launch  of  the  Bismarck  was  timed  accordingly. 
From  Hamburg  the  Emperor  proceeds  aboard  the  Im- 
perial yacht  Hohenzollem  up  the  Elbe  to  Brunsbiittel 
for  the  annual  regatta  of  the  North  German  Yacht 
Squadron,  a  club  consisting  for  the  most  part  of  Ham- 
burg, Bremen  and  Liibeck  patricians  with  the  love  of 
the  sea  inborn  in  their  Hanseatic  veins.  There  was 
no  variation  from  the  time-honored  programme  in 
1914.  William  II  even  adhered  to  his  unfailing  prac- 
tice of  delivering  an  apotheosis  of  the  marine  pro- 
fession at  the  regatta-dinner  of  the  N.  G.  Y.  S.  aboard 
the  Hamburg- American  steamer  on  which  Herr  Ballin 
is  wont  to  entertain  for  Kiel  Week  a  party  of  two  or 
three  hundred  German  and  foreign  notables.  There 
was  no  glimmer  of  coming  events  in  the  guest-list  of 
S\  S.  Victoria  Luise,  for  it  included  Mr.  John  Walter, 
one  of  the  hereditary  proprietors  of  The  Times,  and 
several  other  distinguished  Englishmen  soon  to  be 
Germany's  hated  foes. 

By  that  occult  agency  which  determines  with  dia- 


4  THE   ASSAULT 

bolical  delight  the  irony  of  fate,  it  was  ordained  that 
Kiel,  1914,  should  be  the  occasion  of  a  spectacular 
Anglo-German  love- feast,  with  a  squadron  of  British 
super-dreadnoughts  anchored  in  the  midst  of  the 
peaceful  German  Armada  as  a  sign  to  all  the  world 
of  the  non-explosive  warmth  of  English-German  "re- 
lations." That,  at  any  rate,  was  the  design  of  that 
unfortunately  nebulous  element  in  Berlin,  headed  by 
Doctor  von  Bethmann  Hollweg,  "known  as  the  Peace 
Party;  for  had  certain  highly-placed  Germans  acting 
under  the  Imperial  Chancellor's  inspiration  had  their 
way,  the  British  Admiralty  yacht  Enchantress,  the 
official  craft  of  the  First  Lord  of  the  Admiralty  and 
actually  bearing  that  dignitary,  Mr.  Winston  Churchill, 
M.  P.,  would  have  been  convoyed  to  Kiel  by  Vice- 
Admiral  Sir  George  Warrender's  ironclads.  The 
Kaiser's  approval  of  the  Churchill  project — as  I  hap- 
pen to  know — had  been  sought  and  secured.  Eminent 
friends  of  an  Anglo-German  rapprochement  in  Lon- 
don had  done  the  necessary  log-rolling  in  England. 
Matters  were  regarded  in  Germany  so  much  of  a 
fait  accompli  that  an  anchorage  diagram  issued  by 
the  naval  authorities  at  Kiel  only  a  fortnight  before 
the  "Week"  indicated  the  precise  spot  at  which  Mr. 
Churchill  and  the  Enchantress  would  make  fast  in  the 
harbor  of  Kiel  Bay. 

But  Mr.  Churchill  did  not  come.  I  know  why. 
Grand-Admiral  von  Tirpitz,  to  whom  the  half- 
American  enfant  terrible  of  British  politics  was  a  pet 
aversion,  did  not  want  him  at  Kiel.  Mr.  Churchill's 
visit  might  have  resulted  in  some  sort  of  an  Anglo- 
German  naval  modus  vivendi,  or  otherwise  postponed 
"the  Day."    The  German  War  Party's  plans,  so  soon 


THE    CURTAIN    RAISER  5 

to  materialize,  would  have  been  sadly  thrown  out  of 
gear  by  such  an  untimely  event,  and  von  Tirpitz  is 
not  the  man  to  brook  interference  with  his  pro- 
grammes. Had  not  the  German  Government,  under 
the  Grand-Admiral's  invincible  leadership,  persist- 
ently rejected  the  hand  of  naval  peace  stretched  out 
by  the  British  Cabinet?  Was  it  not  Mr.  Churchill's 
own  proposals  to  which  Berlin  had  repeatedly  re- 
turned an  imperious  No?  Could  Germany  afford  to 
run  the  risk  of  being  cajoled,  amid  the  festive  atmos- 
phere of  Kiel  Week,  into  concessions  which  she  had 
hitherto  successively  withheld?  Von  Tirpitz  said  No 
again.  For  years  he  had  been  saying  the  same  thing 
on  the  subject  of  an  armaments  understanding  with 
Britain.  He  said  No  to  Prince  Biilow  when  the 
fourth  Chancellor  suggested  the  advisability  of  mod- 
erating a  German  naval  policy  certain  to  lead  to  con- 
flict with  Great  Britain.  He  said  No  to  Doctor  von 
Bethmann  Hollweg  when  Billow's  successor  timor- 
ously suggested  from  time  to  time,  as  he  did,  the 
foolhardiness  of  a  programme  which  meant,  in  an  his- 
toric phrase  of  Billow's,  "pressure  and  counter- 
pressure."  Von  Tirpitz  had  had  his  way  with  two 
German  Chancellors,  his  nominal  superiors,  in  suc- 
cession. He  never  dreamt  of  allowing  himself  to  be 
bowled  over  now  by  an  amateur  sailor  from  London, 
who,  if  he  came  to  Kiel,  would  only  come  armed  with  a 
fresh  bait  designed  to  rob  the  Fatherland  of  its 
"future  upon  the  water." 

Until  a  bare  two  weeks  before  the  date  of  the  ar- 
rival of  the  British  Squadron  in  German  waters,  noth- 
ing was  publicly  known  either  in  London  or  Berlin 
of  the  projected  trip  of  Mr.  Churchill  to  Kiel.     Von 


6  THE  ASSAULT 

Tirpitz  thereupon  had  resort  to  the  weapon  he  wields 
almost  as  dexterously  as  the  submarine — publicity — 
to  depopularize  the  scheme  of  the  misguided  friends 
of  Anglo-German  peace.  It  was  not  the  first  time,  of 
course,  that  the  Grand-Admiral  had  deliberately 
crossed  the  avowed  policy  of  the  German  Foreign 
Office.  Von  Tirpitz  now  caused  the  Churchill-Kiel 
enterprise  to  be  "exposed"  in  the  press,  in  the  confi- 
dent hope  that  premature  announcement  would  effectu- 
ally kill  the  entire  plan.  It  did.  Tirpitz  diplomacy 
scored  again,  as  it  was  wont  to  do.  Whereof  I  speak 
in  this  highly  pertinent  connection  I  know,  on  the 
authority  of  one  of  von  Tirpitz's  most  subtle  and 
trusted  henchmen.  To  the  latter' s  eyes,  I  hope,  these 
reminiscences  may  some  day  come.  He,  at  least,  will 
know  that  history,  not  fiction,  is  recited  here. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  FIRST  ACT 

"T  AM  simply  in  my  element  here!"  exclaimed  the 
J_  Kaiser  ecstatically  to  Vice-Admiral  Sir  George 
Warrender,  as  the  twain  stood  surveying  the  glitter- 
ing array  of  steel-blue  German  and  British  men-of- 
war  facing  one  another  amicably  on  the  unruffled 
bosom  of  Kiel  harbor  at  high  noon  of  June  25.  From 
my  perch  of  vantage  abaft  the  forward  thirteen-and- 
one-half-inch  guns  of  His  Britannic  Majesty's  super- 
dreadnought  battleship  King  George  V ,  whither  the 
quartette  of  London  correspondents  had  been  banished 
during  William  II's  sojourn  in  the  flagship,  I  could 
"see"  him  talking  on  the  quarter-deck  below,  speaking 
with  those  nervous,  jerky  right-arm  gestures  which 
are  as  important  a  part  of  his  staccato  conversation 
as  uttered  words. 

The  Kaiser  was  inspecting  his  flagship,  for  when 
he  boarded  us,  almost  without  notice,  in  accordance 
with  his  irrepressible  love  of  a  surprise,  Sir  George 
Warrender's  flag  came  down  and  the  emblem  of  the 
German  Emperor's  British  naval  rank,  an  Admiral  of 
the  Fleet,  was  hoisted  atop  all  the  British  vessels  in 
the  port.  For  the  nonce  the  Hohenzollern  War  Lord 
was  Britannia's  senior  in  command.  Aboard  the 
four  great  twenty-three-thousand-ton  battleships,  King 
George  V,  Audacious,  Centurion  and  Ajax  and  the 

7 


8  THE   ASSAULT 

three  fast  "light  cruisers"  Birmingham,  Southampton 
and  Nottingham  there  was,  for  the  better  part  of  an 
hour,  no  man  to  say  him  nay.  I  wonder  if  he,  or  any 
of  us  at  Kiel  during  that  amazing  week,  let  our  imagi- 
nations run  riot  and  conjure  up  the  vision  of  the 
Birmingham  in  action  against  German  warships  off 
Heligoland  within  ten  short  weeks,  or  of  the  Auda- 
cious at  the  bottom  of  the  Irish  Sea,  victim  of  a  Ger- 
man mine,  five  months  later? 

Warrender's  squadron  had  come  to  Kiel  two  days 
before.  Another  British  squadron  was  at  the  same 
moment  paying  a  similar  visit  of  courtesy  and  friend- 
ship to  the  Russian  Navy  at  Riga.  The  English  said 
then,  and  insist  now,  that  their  ships  were  dispatched 
to  greet  the  Kaiser  and  the  Czar  as  sincere  messengers 
of  peace  and  good-will.  The  Germans,  in  the  myopic 
view  they  have  taken  of  all  things  since  the  war 
began,  are  convinced  that  the  White  Ensign  which 
floated  at  Kiel  six  weeks  before  Great  Britain  and 
Germany  went  to  war  was  the  emblem  of  deceit  and 
hypocrisy,  sent  there  to  flap  in  the  Fatherland's  guile- 
less face  while  Perfidious  Albion  was  crouching  for 
the  attack.  They  say  that  to-day,  even  in  presence 
of  the  incongruous  fact  that  Serajevo,  which  ap- 
plied the  match  to  the  European  powder-barrel,  wrote 
its  red  name  across  history's  page  while  the  British 
squadron  was  still  riding  at  anchor  in  Germany's  war 
harbor. 

It  was  exactly  ten  years  to  the  week  since  Brit- 
ish warships  had  last  been  to  Kiel.  I  happened  to  be 
there  on  that  occasion,  too,  when  King  Edward  VII, 
convoyed  by  a  cruiser  squadron,  shed  the  luster  of  his 
vivacious  presence  on  the  gayest  "Week"  Kiel  ever 


THE    FIRST    ACT  9 

knew.  Meantime  the  Anglo-German  political  atmos- 
phere had  remained  too  stubbornly  clouded  to  make 
an  interchange  of  naval  amenities,  of  all  things,  either 
logical  or  possible.  It  was  the  era  in  which  Germania 
was  preparing  her  grim  battle-toilet  for  "the  Day" — 
for  all  the  world  to  see,  as  she,  justly  enough,  always 
insisted.  They  were  the  years  in  which  her  new 
dreadnought  fleet  sprang  into  being.  It  was  the 
period  in  which  offer  after  offer  from  England  for 
an  "understanding"  on  the  question  of  naval  arma- 
ments met  nothing  but  the  cold  shoulder  in  Tirpitz- 
ruled  Berlin.  Not  until  the  summer  of  1914  had  it 
seemed  feasible  for  British  and  German  warships  to 
mingle  in  friendly  contact.  Doctor  von  Bethmann 
Hollweg  quite  legitimately  accounted  the  arrange- 
ment of  the  Kiel  love- feast  as  an  achievement  of  no 
mean  magnitude,  viewed  in  the  light  of  the  ten  acri- 
monious years  which  preceded  it.  The  War  Party, 
realizing  its  harmlessness,  and,  indeed,  recognizing  its 
value  for  the  party's  stealthy  purposes,  blandly  tol- 
erated it.  Even  Grand-Admiral  von  Tirpitz  was  on 
hand  to  do  the  honors,  and  no  one  performs  them  more 
suavely  than  Germany's  fork-bearded  sailor-statesman. 
The  day  after  Sir  George  Warrender's  vessels 
crept  majestically  out  of  the  Baltic  past  Friedrichsort, 
at  the  mouth  of  Kiel  harbor,  to  be  welcomed  by  twenty- 
one  German  guns  from  shore  batteries,  the  sympto- 
matic event  of  the  "Week"  was  enacted — the  formal 
opening  of  the  reconstructed  Kaiser  Wilhelm  Canal. 
I  place  that  day,  June  24,  not  far  behind  the  san- 
guinary 28th  of  June,  when  Archduke  Franz  Ferdi- 
nand fell,  in  its  direct  relationship  to  the  outbreak  of 
the  war.    When  the  giant  locks  of  Holtenau  swung 


10  THE   ASSAULT 

free,  ready  henceforth  for  the  passage  of  William  II's 
greatest  warships,  the  moment  of  Germany's  up-to- 
the-minute  preparedness  for  Armageddon  was  sig- 
nalized. 

For  ten  plodding  years  tens  of  thousands  of  hands 
had  been  at  work  converting  the  waterway  which 
links  Baltic  Germany  with  North  Sea  Germany  (Kiel 
with  Wilhelmshaven)  into  a  channel  wide  and  deep 
enough  for  navigation  by  battleships  of  the  largest 
bulk.  After  an  expenditure  of  more  than  fifty  million 
dollars  the  canal,  dedicated  with  pomp  and  ceremony 
in  1892  to  the  peaceful  requirements  of  European 
shipping,  was  now  become  a  war  canal,  pure  and  sim- 
ple, raised  to  the  war  dimension  and  destined,  as  the 
German  War  Party  knew,  to  play  the  role  for  which 
it  was  rebuilt  almost  before  its  newly-banked  stone 
sides  had  settled  in  their  foundations.  When  I 
watched  proud  William  II,  standing  solemn  and 
statue-like  on  the  bridge  of  his  Imperial  yacht  Hohen- 
zollern,  as  her  gleaming  golden  bow  broke  through 
the  black- white-red  strand  of  ribbon  stretched  across 
the  locks,  I  recall  distinctly  an  invincible  feeling  that 
I  was  witness  of  an  historic  moment.  Germany's 
army,  I  said  to  myself,  had  long  been  ready.  Now 
her  fleet  was  ready,  too.  With  an  inland  avenue  of 
safe  retreat,  invulnerably  fortified  at  either  end, 
Teuton  sea  strategists  had  always  insisted  that  the 
Fatherland's  naval  position  would  be  well-nigh  im- 
pregnable. That  hour  had  arrived.  There  was 
the  Kaiser,  before  my  very  eyes,  leading  the  way 
through  the  War  Canal  for  his  twenty-seven-thousand- 
flve-hundred-ton  battleships  and  battle  cruisers,  and 
even  for  his  thirty-five-thousand-ton  or  fifty-thousand- 


THE   FIRST   ACT  11 

ton  creations  of  some  later  day,  for  the  War  Canal  was 
made  over  for  to-morrow,  as  well  as  for  to-day.  The 
German  war  machine  tightened  up  the  last  bolt  when 
William  of  Hohenzollern  emerged  from  Holtenau 
locks  into  the  harbor  of  Kiel,  spectacular  symbol  of 
the  fact  that  German  ironclads  of  any  dimensions 
were  now  able  to  sally  back  and  forth  from  the  Baltic 
to  the  North  Sea  and  hide  for  a  year,  as  the  world  has 
meantime  seen,  even  from  the  Mistress  of  the  Seas. 
No  wonder  a  British  bluejacket,  forming  the  link  of 
an  endless  chain  of  his  fellows  dressing  ship  round 
the  rail  of  the  Centurion  in  honor  of  the  War  Lord, 
whispered  audibly  to  a  mate,  as  the  Hohenzollern 
steamed  down  the  line  to  her  anchorage,  "Say,  Bill, 
don't  he  look  jest  like  Gawd !"  Perhaps  the  Divinely- 
Anointed  felt  that  way,  too. 

When  the  Kaiser  had  left  the  King  George  V  after 
a  politely  cursory  "inspection" — the  only  real  "under- 
standing" effected  between  England  and  Germany  at 
Kiel  was  a  tacit  agreement  on  the  part  of  officers  and 
men  to  do  no  amateur  spying  in  one  another's  ships — 
Sir  George  Warrender  summoned  us  from  the  turret 
and  told  us  some  details  of  the  All-Highest  visitation. 
The  Emperor  had  been  "delighted  to  make  his  first 
call  in  a  British  dreadnought  aboard  so  magnificent 
a  specimen  as  the  King  George  V"  (she  and  her  sis- 
ters being  at  the  time  the  most  powerful  battleships 
flying  the  Union  Jack) .  He  wanted  the  Vice- Admiral 
to  assure  the  British  Government  what  pleasure  it 
had  done  the  German  Navy  "in  sending  these  fine 
ships  to  Kiel."  He  hoped  nothing  was  being  left  un- 
done to  "complete  the  English  sailors'  happiness"  in 
German  waters.    That  extorted  from  Sir  George  War- 


12  THE   ASSAULT 

render  the  exclamation  that  German  hospitality,  like 
all  else  Teutonic,  was  seemingly  thoroughness  personi- 
fied, for  somebody  had  even  been  thoughtful  enough 
to  lay  a  submarine  telephone  cable  from  the  Seebade- 
Anstalt  Hotel  to  the  Vice-Admiral's  flagship,  so  that 
Lady  Maude  Warrender  might  talk  from  her  apart- 
ments on  shore  directly  to  her  husband's  quarters 
afloat. 

"Yes,"  continued  the  Kaiser,  who  is  a  genial  con- 
versationalist and  raconteur,  "I  am  in  my  element  in 
surroundings  like  these.  I  love  the  sea.  I  like  to  go 
to  launchings  of  ships.  I  am  passionately  fond  of 
yachting.  You  must  sail  with  me  to-morrow,  Admiral, 
in  my  newest  Meteor,  the  fifth  of  the  name.  I  race 
only  with  German  crews  now.  Time  was  when  I  had 
to  have  British  skippers  and  British  sailors.  You  see, 
my  aim  is  to  breed  a  race  of  German  yachtsmen.  As 
fast  as  I've  trained  a  good  crew  in  the  Meteor,  I  let 
it  go  to  the  new  owner  of  the  boat.  I  am  the  loser 
by  that  system,  but  I  have  the  satisfaction  of  knowing 
that  I  am  promoting  a  good  cause."  The  confab  was 
approaching  its  end.     "Oh,  Admiral,  before  I  forget, 

how  is  Lady and  the  Duchess  of ? 

I  know  so  many  of  your  handsome  Englishwomen." 

Sir  George  Warrender's  captains  and  the  officers 
of  the  flagship  were  now  grouped  around  him  for  a 
farewell  salute  to  their  Imperial  senior  officer.  The 
Kaiser  spied  the  King  George  V's  chaplain,  and  lean- 
ing over  to  him  inquired,  gaily,  "Chaplain,  is  there 
any  swearing  in  this  ship?"  "Oh,  never,  Your 
Majesty,  never  any  swearing  in  a  British  dread- 
nought !"  The  War  Lord  liked  that,  for  we  who  had 
been  in  the  Olympian  heights  for'd  remembered  his 


THE    FIRST    ACT  13 

laughing  aloud  at  this  veracious  tribute  to  Jack  Tar's 
world- famed  purity  of  diction. 

Kiel  Week  thenceforward  was  an  endless  round  of 
Anglo-German  pleasantries.  A  Zeppelin,  harbinger 
of  coming  events,  hovered  over  the  British  squadron 
at  intervals,  her  crew  wagging  cheery  greetings  to 
the  ships  while  acquainting  themselves  at  close  range 
with  the  looks  of  English  dreadnoughts  from  the  sky. 
British  sailormen  paid  fraternal  visits  to  German 
dreadnoughts  and  German  sailormen  returned  their 
calls.  The  crew  of  the  Ajax  gave  a  music-hall 
smoker  in  honor  of  the  crew  of  the  big  battle-cruiser 
Seydlitz,  the  Teuton  tars  being  no  little  awestruck 
by  the  complacency  with  which  two  heavyweight  Brit- 
ish boxers  pummeled  each  other  a  sea-green  for  six 
rounds  and  then  smilingly  shook  hands  when  it  was 
all  over.  Germans  never  punch  one  another  except  in 
gory  hate,  and  they  seldom  fight  with  their  fists.  The 
Kaiser  was  host  nightly  at  splendid  State  dinners  in 
the  Hohenzollem  and  Vice-Admiral  Warrender  re- 
turned the  fire  with  state  banquets  aboard  the  King 
George  V.  The  atmosphere  was  fairly  thick  with 
brotherly  love.  It  was  not  so  much  as  ruffled  even 
when  the  octogenarian  Earl  of  Brassey,  who  wards 
off  rheumatism  by  an  early  morning  pull  in  his  row- 
boat,  was  arrested  by  a  German  harbor-policeman  as 
an  "English  spy"  for  approaching  the  forbidden 
waters  of  Kiel  dockyard.  German  diplomacy  was 
typically  represented  by  Lord  Brassey's  zealous  captor, 
for  the  master  of  the  famous  Sunbeam  brought  that 
venerable  craft  to  Kiel  to  demonstrate  that  English- 
men of  his  class  sincerely  favored  peace,  and,  if  possi- 
ble,  friendship  with  Germany.     Wilhelmstrasse  tact 


14  THE   ASSAULT 

was  exemplified  again  when,  by  way  of  apology  to 
Lord  Brassey,  the  Kiel  police  explained  that  there 
was,  of  course,  no  intention  of  charging  him  with 
espionage.  The  policeman  who  arrested  him  merely 
thought  he  was  nabbing  a  smuggler!  At  dinner  that 
night  in  the  Hohenzollern,  the  Kaiser  chuckled 
jovially  at  Lord  Brassey's  expense.  England's  great- 
est living  marine  historian  stole  away  from  Kiel  with 
the  Sunbeam  in  the  gray  dawn  of  the  next  day,  with 
new  ideas  of  German  courtesy  to  the  stranger  within 
the  gate.    He  had  intended  to  stay  longer. 

Of  all  the  billing  and  cqoing  at  Kiel  there  is  photo- 
graphed most  indelibly  on  my  memory  the  glorious 
jamboree  of  the  sailors  of  the  British  and  German 
squadrons  in  the  big  assembly  hall  at  the  Imperial 
dockyard  on  the  Saturday  night  of  the  "Week." 
There  were  free  beer,  free  tobacco,  free  provender  for 
everybody,  in  typical  German  plenty.  A  ship's 
band  blared  rag-time  and  horn-pipes  all  night  long. 
Only  the  supply  of  Kiel  girls  fell  short  of  the  demand, 
but  that  only  made  merrier  fun  for  the  bluejackets, 
who,  lacking  fair  partners,  danced  with  one  another, 
and  when  the  hour  had  become  really  hilarious,  they 
tripped  across  the  floor,  when  they  were  not  rolling 
over  it,  embracing  in  threes,  bunny-hugging,  gro- 
tesquely tangoing,  turkey-trotting  and  fish-walking 
more  joyously  than  men  ever  reveled  before. 

There,  I  thought,  was  Anglo-German  friendship  in 
being — not  an  ideal,  but  an  actuality.  I  am  sure  the 
British  and  German  tars  at  Kiel  that  boisterous  Satur- 
day night  which  melted  into  the  Sunday  of  Serajevo 
little  dreamt  that  when  next  they  would  be  locked  in  one 
another's  arms,  it  would  be  at  grips  for  life  or  death. 


CHAPTER  III 


THE  PLOT  DEVELOPS 


VON  G.  is  a  Junker.  He  is  also  Germany's 
ablest  special  correspondent.  A  Junker,  let  the 
uninitiated  understand,  is  a  Prussian  land  baron,  or 
one  of  his  descendants,  who  considers  dominion  over 
the  earth  and  all  its  worms  his  by  Divine  Right.  If, 
like  von  G.,  a  Junker  is  an  army  officer  besides,  active 
or  ausser  Dienst,  and  had  a  grandfather  who  belonged 
to  Moltke's  headquarters  in  1870-71,  he  is  the  super- 
latively real  thing.  So,  as  my  mission  in  Germany 
was  study  of  the  Fatherland  in  its  characteristic  rami- 
fications, I  always  felt  myself  richly  favored  by  the 
friendship  and  professional  comradeship  of  von  G. 
He  was  Junkerism  incarnate.  Several  years'  residence 
in  the  United  States  had  signally  failed  to  corrode 
von  G.'s  Junker  instincts.  Indeed,  it  intensified  them, 
for  he  was  ever  after  a  confirmed  believer  in  the  igno- 
minious failure  of  Democracy.  It  was  he  who  popu- 
larized "Dollarica"  as  a  German  nickname  for  "God's 
country." 

Von  G.  and  I  roomed  together  at  Kiel,  sharing 
apartments  and  a  bath  in  the  harbormaster's  flat  above 
the  Imperial  Yacht  Club  postoffice,  whose  two  stories 
of  brick  and  stucco  serve  as  "annex"  to  the  always 
overcrowded  and  palatial  Krupp  hotel,  the  Seebade- 
Anstalt,  at  the  other  end  of  the  flowered  club  grounds. 

15 


16  THE    ASSAULT 

That  bath,  which  I  mention  in  no  spirit  of  ablutionary 
arrogance,  has  to  do  with  the  story  of  von  G.,  for  it 
was  to  bring  me  on  a  day  destined  to  be  historic  in 
violent  conflict  with  Junkerism.  Von  G.  and  I  regu- 
lated the  bath  situation  at  Kiel  by  leaving  word  on 
our  landlady's  slate  the  night  before  which  of  us 
would  bathe  first  next  morning  and  at  what  hour. 
The  bath  happened  to  adjoin  my  sleeping  quarters  and 
von  G.  could  not  reach  it  except  by  crossing  my  bed- 
room, which  he  always  entered  without  knocking. 
On  Sunday,  June  28,  fateful  day,  von  G.  was  timed 
to  bathe  at  eight  a.  m.,  I  at  nine — so  read  the  schedule 
inscribed  by  our  respective  hands  on  the  good  Frau 
Hafenmeister's  tablet.  At  seven-thirty  I  was  roused 
from  my  feathered  slumbers  by  her  soft  footsteps — the 
softest  steps  of  German  harbormasters'  wives  are  quite 
audible — as  she  trundled  across  the  room  to  arrange 
Herr  von  G.'s  eight  o'clock  dip.  Junkers  are  punctual 
people,  but  that  morning  mine  was  late.  Eight,  eight- 
thirty,  eighty- forty-five  passed,  and  there  was  no  sign 
of  him.  When  nine  o'clock  came,  I  thought  I  might 
reasonably  conclude,  in  my  rude,  inconsiderate  Ameri- 
can way,  that  von  G.  had  overslept  or  postponed  his 
bath,  so  I  made  for  the  tub  at  the  hour  I  had  intended 
to.  I  was  just  stepping  one  foot  into  it  when — it  was 
nine-ten  now — von  G.,  rubbing  his  eyes,  bolted  in. 

"What  do  you  mean  by  taking  my  bath?"  he  yelled 
at  me.  "That's  some  of  your  damned  American  im- 
pudence !" 

Whereupon,  imperturbably  pouring  the  rest  of  me 
into  the  bath,  I  ventured  to  suggest  to  Field-Marshal 
von  G.,  that  if  he  would  drop  the  barrack-yard  tone 
and  remember  that  I  was  neither  a  Dachshund  nor  a 


THE    PLOT    DEVELOPS  17 

Pomeranian  recruit,  I  would  deign  to  hold  converse 
on  the  point  under  debate.  I  am  not  sure  I  spoke  as 
calmly  as  that  sounds,  for  to  gain  a  conversational 
lap  on  a  German  you  must  outshout  him.  At  any 
rate,  von  G.,  abandoning  abuse,  stalked  whimper- 
ingly from  the  room,  fired  some  rearguard  shrapnel 
about  "just  like  an  American's  'nerve',"  and  bathed 
later  in  the  day. 

I  did  not  see  him  again  until  about  five  o'clock  that 
afternoon.  He  bolted  into  my  room  this  time,  too, 
but  in  excitement,  not  anger. 

"The  Archduke  Franz  Ferdinand  and  his  wife  have 
been  assassinated,"  he  exclaimed. 

"Good  God !"  I  rejoined,  stupefied. 

"It's  a  good  thing,"  said  von  G.  quietly. 

For  many  days  and  nights  I  wondered  what  the 
Junker  meant.  I  think  I  know  now.  He  meant  that 
the  War  Party  (of  which  he  was  a  very  potent  and 
zealous  member)  had  at  length  found  a  pretext  for 
forcing  upon  Europe  the  struggle  for  which  the  Ger- 
man War  Lords  regarded  themselves  vastly  more  ready 
than  any  possible  combination  of  foes.  The  first  year 
of  the  war  has  amply  demonstrated  the  accuracy  of 
their  calculations.  Germany's  triumphs  in  the  opening 
twelvemonth  of  Armageddon  were  the  triumphs  of  the 
superlatively  prepared.  If  Serajevo  had  not  come 
along  when  it  did — with  the  German  military  establish- 
ment just  built  up  to  a  peace- footing  of  nearly  one  mil- 
lion officers  and  men  and  re-armed  at  a  cost  of  two 
hundred  and  fifty  million  dollars;  with  von  Tirpitz's 
Fleet  at  the  acme  of  its  efficiency;  with  the  Kiel  Canal 
reconstructed  for  the  passage  of  super-dreadnought 
ironclads — Germany's  readiness  for  war  might  have 


18  THE   ASSAULT 

been  fatally  inferior  to  that  of  her  enemies-to-be.  The 
Fatherland  was  ready,  armed  to  the  teeth,  as  nation 
never  was  before.  The  psychological  moment  had 
dawned. 

This  was  the  reassuring  state  of  affairs  at  home. 
What  did  the  War  Party  see  when  it  put  its  mailed 
hand  to  the  vizor  and  looked  abroad,  across  to  Eng- 
land, west  over  the  Rhine  to  France,  and  toward  Rus- 
sia ?  It  saw  Great  Britain  on  what  truly  enough  looked 
to  most  of  the  world  like  the  brink  of  revolution  in 
Ireland.  It  saw  a  France,  of  which  a  great  Senator 
had  only  a  few  days  before  said  that  her  forts  were 
defective,  her  guns  short  of  ammunition  and  her  army 
lacking  in  even  such  rudimentary  war  sinews  as  suffi- 
cient boots  for  the  troops.  It  saw  a  Russia  stirred  by 
industrial  strife  which  seemed  to  need  only  the  threat 
of  grave  foreign  complications  to  inflame  her  always 
rebellious  proletariat  into  revolt.  Serajevo  had  all  the 
earmarks  of  providential  timeliness. 

"It's  a  good  thing,"  said  the  sententious  von  G. 

The  "trippers"  from  Hamburg  and  nearer-by  points 
in  Schleswig-Holstein,  whom  the  Sunday  of  Kiel 
Week  attracts  by  the  thousand,  were  far  more  stunned 
than  von  G.  by  the  news  from  Bosnia,  which  put  so 
tragic  an  end  to  their  seaside  holiday.  The  esplanade, 
which  had  been  throbbing  with  bustle  and  glittering 
with  color,  did  not  know  at  first  why  all  the 
ships  in  the  harbor,  British  as  well  as  German,  had 
suddenly  lowered  their  pennants  to  half-mast,  or  why 
the  Austrian  royal  standard  had  suddenly  broken  out, 
also  at  the  mourning  altitude.  The  Kaiser  was  racing 
in  the  Baltic.  "Old  Franz  Josef,"  some  said,  "has 
died.     He's  been  going  for  many  a  day."     Presently 


THE    PLOT    DEVELOPS  19 

the  truth  percolated  through  the  awestruck  crowds. 
The  sleek  white  naval  dispatch-boat  Sleipner  tore 
through  the  Bay,  Baltic-bound.  She  carries  news  to 
William  II  when  he  governs  Germany  from  the  quar- 
ter-deck of  the  Hohenzollern.  Sleipner  dodged 
eel-like,  through  the  lines  of  British  and  German  men- 
of-war,  ocean  liners,  pleasure-craft  and  racing-yachts 
anchored  here,  there  and  everywhere.  In  fifteen  min- 
utes she  was  alongside  the  Emperor's  fleet  schooner, 
Meteor  V,  which  had  broken  off  her  race  on  receipt 
of  wireless  tidings  of  the  Archducal  couple's  murder- 
ous fate.  The  Hohenzollern  had  already  "wire- 
lessed" for  the  fastest  torpedo-boat  in  port  to  fetch 
the  Kaiser  and  his  staff  off  the  Meteor,  and  the  de- 
stroyer and  Sleipner  snorted  up,  foam-bespattered, 
almost  simultaneously.  The  Emperor  clambered  into 
the  torpedo-boat  and  started  for  the  harbor. 

It  was  the  face  of  a  William  II,  blanched  ashen- 
gray,  which  turned  from  the  bridge  of  the  destroyer 
to  acknowledge,  in  solemn  gravity,  the  salutes  of  the 
officers  and  crew  of  the  British  flagship,  as  the  Kaiser's 
craft  raced  past  the  King  George  V.  Always  stern 
of  mien,  the  Emperor  now  looked  severity  personified. 
His  staff  stood  apart.  He  seemed  to  wish  to  be  alone, 
absolutely,  with  the  overwhelming  thoughts  of  the 
moment.  Three  minutes  later,  and  he  stepped  aboard 
the  Hohenzollern.  Now  another  pennant  showed 
at  the  mainmast  of  the  Imperial  yacht — the  blue  and 
yellow  signal  flag  which  means :  "His  Majesty  is 
aboard,  but  preoccupied."  I  wonder  if  posterity  will 
ever  know  what  monumental  reflections  flitted  through 
the  Kaiser's  mind  in  that  first  hour  after  Serajevo? 
Did  he,  like  von  G.,  think  it  was  "a  good  thing,"  too? 


20  THE   ASSAULT 

I  suppose  the  first  stars  and  stripes  to  be  half-masted 
anywhere  in  the  world  that  dread  sundown  were  those 
which  drooped  from  the  stern  of  Utowana,  Mr.  Alli- 
son Vincent  Armour's  steam-yacht,  anchored  in  the 
Bay  off  Kiel  Naval  Academy.  A  puffing  little  launch 
took  me  out  to  the  Utowana  as  soon  as  I  had  gath- 
ered some  coherent  facts,  which  I  wanted  to  present 
to  Mr.  Armour  and  his  guests,  American  Ambassador 
and  Mrs.  James  W.  Gerard,  of  Berlin,  who  had 
motored  to  Kiel  the  day  before.  Mrs.  Gerard's  sister, 
Countess  Sigray,  is  the  wife  of  a  Hungarian  noble- 
man, and  the  Ambassador's  wife,  if  my  memory  serves 
me  correctly,  once  told  me  of  her  sister's  acquaintance 
with  both  of  the  assassinated  Royalties.  We  Ameri- 
cans discussed  the  immediate  consequences  of  the  day's 
event — how  the  Kaiser  would  take  it,  how  it  would 
affect  poor  old  Emperor  Francis  Joseph.  William  II 
and  Admiral  von  Tirpitz  had  been  the  Archduke's 
guests  at  Konopischt  in  Bohemia  only  a  few  weeks 
before.  The  Kaiser  and  the  future  ruler  of  Austria- 
Hungary  had  become  great  friends.  They  were  not 
always  that.  There  had  been  a  good  deal  of  the  Will- 
iam II  in  Franz  Ferdinand  himself.  People  often  said 
it  was  a  case  of  Greek  meet  Greek,  and  that  two  such 
insistent  personalities  were  inevitably  bound  to  clash. 
Others  said  that  the  Archduke,  inspired  by  his  bril- 
liantly clever  consort,  always  insisted  that  German 
overlordship  in  Vienna  would  cease  when  he  came  to 
the  throne.  Still  others  knew  that  despite  antipathies 
and  antagonisms,  the  two  men  had  at  length  come  to 
be  genuinely  fond  of  each  other,  and  that  their  ideas 
and  ideals  for  the  greater  glory  of  Germanic  Europe 
coincided. 


THE   PLOT    DEVELOPS  21 

These  things  we  chatted  and  canvassed,  irrespon- 
sibly, on  Utowana's  immaculate  deck.  All  of  us  were 
persuaded  of  the  imminency  of  a  crisis  in  Austrian- 
Serbian  relations  in  consequence  of  Princip's  crime. 
But  I  am  quite  sure  not  a  soul  of  us  held  himself 
capable  of  imagining  that,  because  of  that  remote 
felony,  Great  Britain  and  Germany  would  be  at  war 
five  weeks  later.  Beyond  us  spread  the  peaceful 
panorama  of  British  and  German  war-craft,  anchored 
side  by  side,  and  the  thought  would  have  perished  at 
birth. 

Returned  to  the  terrace  of  the  Seebade-Anstalt,  one 
found  the  atmosphere  heavily  charged  with  suppressed 
excitement.  Immaculately-groomed  young  diplomats, 
down  from  Berlin  for  the  Sunday,  were  twirling  their 
walking-sticks  and  yellow  gloves  which  were  not,  after 
all,  to  accompany  them  to  Grand-Admiral  Prince 
Henry  of  Prussia's  garden-party.  That,  like  every- 
thing else  connected  with  Kiel  Week,  had  suddenly 
been  called  off. 

A  party  of  Americans  flocked  together  at  the  en- 
trance to  the  hotel  to  exchange  low-spoken  views  on 
the  all-pervading  topic.  There  was  big  Lieutenant- 
Commander  Walter  R.  Gherardi,  our  wide-awake 
Berlin  Naval  Attache,  resplendent  in  gala  gold-braided 
uniform,  and  Mrs.  Gherardi,  who  had  motored  me 
around  the  environs  of  Kiel  that  morning;  Albert  Bill- 
ings Ruddock,  Third  Secretary  of  the  Embassy,  and 
his  pretty  and  clever  wife;  and  Lanier  Winslow,  Am- 
bassador Gerard's  private  secretary,  his  effervescent 
good  nature  repressed  for  the  first  time  I  ever  re- 
membered observing  it  in  that  unbecoming  and  unnat- 
ural   condition.      Secretary    Ruddock's    father,    Mr. 


22  THE   ASSAULT 

Charles  H.  Ruddock,  of  New  York,  completed  "the 
group. 

I  met  Mr.  Ruddock,  Sr.,  six  months  later  in  New 
York.  "Do  you  remember  what  you  told  me  that 
afternoon  at  Kiel,  when  we  were  discussing  Sera- 
jevo?"  he  asked.  I  pleaded  a  lapse  of  recollection. 
"You  said,"  he  reminded  me,  "  'this  means  war.'  " 

The  aspect  of  Kiel  became  in  the  twinkling  of  an 
eye  as  funereal  as  Sera  jevo  and  Vienna  themselves 
must  have  been  in  that  blood-bespattered  hour.  Bands 
stopped  playing,  flags  not  lowered  to  half-mast  were 
hauled  down  altogether,  and  beer-gardens  emptied. 
"Hohenzollern  weather,"  Teuton  synonym  for  invin- 
cible sunshine,  vanished  in  keeping  with  the  drooping 
spirits  of  everybody  and  everything,  and  bleak  thunder- 
showers  intermingled  with  flashes  of  heat-lightning 
to  complete  the  mise  en  scene.  A  week  of  gaiety  un- 
surpassed evaporated  into  gloom  and  foreboding. 

For  myself  it  had  been  a  week  crowded  with  great 
recollections.  Special  correspondents  telegraphing  to 
influential  foreign  newspapers,  particularly  if  they 
were  English  and  American  newspapers,  were  always 
persona  gratissima  with  German  dignitaries,  even  of 
the  blood  royal.  The  group  of  us  on  duty  at  what, 
alas !  was  to  be  the  last  Kiel  Week,  at  least  of  the  old 
sort,  for  many  a  year,  were  the  recipients,  as 
usual,  of  that  scientific  hospitality  which  foreign 
newspapermen  always  receive  at  German  official 
hands.  Before  we  were  at  Kiel  twenty-four  hours 
we  were  deluged  with  invitations  to  garden-parties  at 
the  Commanding  Admiral's,  to  soirees  innumerable 
ashore  and  afloat,  to  luncheons  at  the  Town  Hall,  to 
the  grand  balls  at  the  Naval  Academy,  and  to  func- 


THE    PLOT    DEVELOPS  23 

tions  of  lesser  magnitude  for  the  bluejackets.  Grand- 
Admiral  von  Tirpitz  had  left  his  card  at  my  lodgings 
and  so  had  Admiral  von  Rebeur-Paschwitz,  the  Chief 
of  Staff  of  the  Baltic  Station,  who  will  be  pleasantly 
remembered  by  friends  of  Washington  days  when  he 
was  German  Naval  Attache  there.  Captain  Lohlein, 
the  courteous  chief  of  the  Press  Bureau  of  the  Navy 
Department  at  Berlin,  had  equipped  me  with  creden- 
tials which  practically  made  me  a  freeman  of  Kiel 
harbor  for  the  time  being.  In  no  single  direction  was 
effort  lacking,  on  the  part  of  the  authorities  who  have 
the  most  practical  conception  of  any  Government  in 
the  world  of  the  value  of  advertising,  to  enable  special 
correspondents  at  Kiel  to  practise  their  profession 
comfortably  and  successfully.  I  must  not  forget  to 
mention  the  visit  paid  me  by  Baron  von  Stumm, 
chief  of  the  Anglo-American  division  of  the  German 
Foreign  Office ;  for  Stumm's  opinion  of  me  underwent 
a  kaleidoscopic  and  mysterious  change  a  few  weeks 
later.  Treasured  conspicuously  in  my  memories  of 
Kiel,  too,  will  long  remain  the  call  I  received  from  Herr 
Krupp  von  Bohlen  und  Halbach's  private  secretary, 
and  the  message  he  brought  me  from  the  Master  of 
Essen.  It  seems  less  cryptic  to  me  now  than  then.  I 
sought  an  interview  from  the  Cannon  Queen's 
consort  about  the  visit  he  and  his  staff  of  experts  had 
just  paid  to  the  great  arsenals  and  dockyards  of  Great 
Britain. 

"Herr  Krupp  von  Bohlen  und  Halbach  presents  his 
compliments,"  said  the  secretary,  "and  asks  me  to  say 
how  much  he  regrets  he  can  not  grant  an  interview,  as 
the  matters  which  took  him  to  England  are  not  such 
as  he  cares  to  discuss  in  public." 


24  THE   ASSAULT 

I  wonder  how  many  American  newspaper  readers, 
in  the  hurly-burly  of  the  fast-marching  events  which 
preceded  and  ushered  in  the  war,  ever  knew  of  the  little 
army  of  eminent  and  expert  "investigators"  who  hon- 
ored England  with  their  company  on  the  very  threshold 
of  hostilities?  June  saw  the  presence  in  London, 
ostensibly  for  "the  season,"  of  Herr  Krupp  von  Boh- 
len  und  Halbach,  accompanied  not  only  by  his  pluto- 
cratic wife,  but  by  his  chief  technical  expert,  Doctor 
Ehrensberger  of  Essen,  an  old-time  friend  of  Ameri- 
can steel  men  like  Mr.  Schwab  and  ex-Ambassador 
Leishman,  and  by  Herr  von  Biilow,  a  kinsman  of  the 
ex-Imperial  Chancellor,  who  was  the  Krupp  general 
representative  in  England.  With  a  naivete  which 
Britons  themselves  now  regard  almost  incomprehen- 
sible, the  Krupp  party  was  shown  over  practically  all 
of  England's  greatest  weapons-of-war  works  at  Birk- 
enhead, Barrow-in-Furness,  Glasgow,  Newcastle-on- 
Tyne  and  Sheffield.  They  saw  the  world-famed  plants 
of  Firth,  Cammell-Laird,  Vickers-Maxim,  Brown, 
Armstrong- Whitworth  and  Hadfield.  Not  with  the 
eyes  of  Cook  tourists,  but  with  the  practised  gaze  of 
specialists,  they  were  privileged  to  look  upon  sights 
which  must  have  sent  them  away  with  a  vivid,  up-to- 
date  and  accurate  impression  of  Britain's  capabilities 
in  the  all-vital  realm  of  production  of  war  materials  for 
both  army  and  navy.  It  was  from  this  personally  con- 
ducted junket  through  the  zone  of  British  war  indus- 
try that  Herr  Krupp  von  Bohlen  und  Halbach  re- 
turned— not  to  Essen,  but  to  Kiel  (where  he  has  his 
summer  home)  and  to  the  Kaiser  and  von  Tirpitz. 
It  was  to  them  his  report  was  made.  I  think  I  under- 
stand better  now  why  he  could  not  see  his  way  to 


THE    PLOT    DEVELOPS  25 

letting  me  tell  the  British  public  what  he  saw  and 
learned  in  England.  I  was  guileless  when  I  sought  the 
interview.  Let  this  be  my  apology  to  Herr  Krupp  von 
Bohlen  und  Halbach  for  attempting  to  penetrate  into 
matters  obviously  not  fit  "to  discuss  in  public." 

During  July  England  entertained  three  other  im- 
portant German  emissaries,  each  a  specialist,  as  be- 
fitted the  country  of  his  origin  and  the  object  of  his 
mission.  Doctor  Dernburg  came  over.  He  spent  ten 
strenuous  days  "in  touch"  with  financial  and  economic 
circles  and  subjects.  No  man  could  be  relied  upon  to 
bring  back  to  Berlin  a  shrewder  estimate  of  the  Brit- 
ish commercial  situation.  A  few  days  later  Herr 
Ballin,  the  German  shipping  king,  crossed  the  channel. 
I  recall  telegraphing  a  Berlin  newspaper  notice  which 
explained  that  the  astute  managing  director  of  the 
Hamburg-American  line  went  to  England  to  "look  into 
the  question  of  fuel-oil  supplies."  Herr  Ballin,  like 
Doctor  Dernburg,  also  kept  "in  touch"  with  the  Brit- 
ish circles  most  important  and  interesting  to  himself 
and  the  Fatherland.  He  must  have  dabbled  in  high 
politics  a  bit,  too,  for  only  the  other  day  Lord  Haldane 
revealed  that  he  arranged  for  Herr  Ballin  to  "meet  a 
few  friends"  at  his  lordship's  hospitable  home  at 
Queen  Anne's  Gate.  Germans  always  felt  a  propri- 
etary right  to  seek  the  hospitality  of  the  Scotch  states- 
man who  acknowledged  that  his  spiritual  domicile 
was  in  the  Fatherland. 

Then,  finally,  came  another  German,  far  more 
august  than  Krupp  von  Bohlen  und  Halbach,  Dern- 
burg and  Ballin — Grand- Admiral  Prince  Henry  of 
Prussia.  His  visit  fell  within  a  week  of  Germany's 
declaration  of  war  against  France  and  Russia.    The 


26  THE   ASSAULT 

Prince,  who  enjoyed  many  warm  friendships  in  Eng- 
land and  visited  the  country  at  frequent  intervals,  also 
spent  a  busy  week  in  London.  He  saw  the  King, 
called  on  with  Prince  Louis  of  Battenberg,  the  then 
First  Sea  Lord,  and  paid  his  respects  to  Mr.  Winston 
Churchill,  First  Lord  of  the  Admiralty.  English- 
men only  conjecture  how  he  put  in  the  rest  of  his  time. 

Perhaps  an  episode  in  the  trial  of  Karl  Lody,  the 
German  naval  spy  who  was  executed  at  the  Tower  of 
London  on  November  6,  has  its  place  in  the  unre- 
corded history  of  Prince  Henry  of  Prussia's  epochal 
visit  to  the  British  Isles.  Lody  confessed  to  his  mili- 
tary judges  at  Middlesex  Guildhall  that  he  received 
his  orders  to  report  on  British  naval  preparations  from 
"a  distinguished  personage." 

"Give  us  his  name,"  commanded  Lord  Cheylesmore, 
presiding  officer  of  the  court. 

"I  would  rather  not  tell  it  in  open  court,"  pleaded 
the  prisoner,  whom  Scotland  Yard,  the  day  before, 
had  asked  me  to  look  at,  with  a  view  to  possible  identi- 
fication with  certain  Berlin  affiliations. 

"I  will  write  his  name  on  a  piece  of  paper  for  the 
court's  confidential  information,"  Lody  added.  His 
request  was  granted. 

When  we  were  officially  notified  that  the  Kaiser 
would  proceed  next  morning  by  special  train  to  Berlin, 
we  made  our  own  preparations  to  depart.  The  British 
squadron  had  still  a  day  and  a  half  of  its  scheduled 
visit  to  complete,  and  Vice-Admiral  Warrender  told 
us  he  would  remain  accordingly.  The  German  Ad- 
miralty had  extended  him  the  hospitality  of  the  new 
War  Canal  for  the  cruise  of  his  fleet  into  the  North 
Sea,  but  he  decided  to  send  only  the  light  cruisers  by 


THE   PLOT    DEVELOPS  27 

that  route  and  take  his  battleships  home,  as  they  had 
come,  by  the  roundabout  route  of  the  Baltic. 

On  Monday  noon,  June  29,  I  went  back  to  Berlin, 
to  live  through  five  weeks  of  finishing  touches  for 
the  grand  world  blood-bath. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  STAGE  MANAGERS 

ARMAGEDDON  was  plotted,  prepared  for  and 
x\. precipitated  by  the  German  War  Party.  It  was 
not  the  work  of  the  German  people.  What  is  the 
"War  Party"  ?  Let  me  begin  by  explaining  what  it  is 
not.  It  is  not  a  party  in  the  sense  of  President  Wil- 
son's organization  or  Colonel  Roosevelt's  Bull 
Moosers.  It  maintains  no  permanent  headquarters  or 
National  Committee,  and  holds  no  conventions.  The 
only  barbecue  it  ever  organized  is  the  one  which 
plunged  the  world  into  gore  and  tears  in  August,  1914, 
though  its  attempts  to  drench  Europe  with  blood  are 
decade-old.  You  would  search  the  German  city  direc- 
tories in  vain  for  the  War  Party's  address  or  tele- 
phone number.  No  German  would  ever  acknowledge 
that  he  belonged  to  Europe's  largest  Black  Hand 
league.  You  could,  indeed,  hardly  find  anybody  in 
Germany  willing  even  to  acknowledge  that  the  War 
Party  even  existed.  Yet,  unseen  and  sinister,  its  grip 
was  fastened  so  heavily  upon  the  machinery  of  State 
that  when  it  deemed  the  moment  for  its  sanguinary 
purposes  at  length  ripe,  the  War  Party  was  able  to 
tear  the  whole  nation  from  its  peaceful  pursuits  and 
fling  it,  armed  to  the  teeth,  against  a  Europe  so  fla- 
grantly unready  that  more  than  a  year  of  strife  finds 
Germany  not  only  unbeaten  but  at  a  zenith  of  fighting 
efficiency  which  her  foes  have  only  begun  to  approach. 

28 


THE    STAGE    MANAGERS  29 

When  the  German  War  Party  pressed  the  button 
for  the  Great  Massacre,  the  Fatherland  had,  roundly, 
sixty-seven  million  five  hundred  thousand  inhabitants 
within  its  thriving  walls.  At  a  liberal  estimate,  no 
one  can  ever  convince  me  that  more  than  one  million 
five  hundred  thousand  Germans  really  wanted  war. 
They  were  the  "War  Party."  Sixty-six  millions  of 
the  Kaiser's  subjects,  immersed  in  the  most  abundant 
prosperity  any  European  country  of  modern  times 
had  been  vouchsafed,  longed  only  for  the  continuance 
of  the  conditions  which  had  brought  about  this  state 
of  unparalleled  national  weal.  I  do  not  believe 
that  William  II,  deep  down  in  his  heart,  craved  for 
war.  I  can  vouch  for  the  literal  accuracy  of  a  hitherto 
unrecorded  piece  of  ante-bellum  history  which  bears 
out  my  doubts  of  the  Kaiser's  immediate  responsibility 
for  the  war,  though  it  does  not  acquit  him  of  supine 
acquiescence  in,  and  to  that  extent  abetting,  the  War 
Party's  plot. 

On  the  afternoon  of  Saturday,  August  1,  1914,  the 
wife  of  Lieutenant-General  Helmuth  von  Moltke,  then 
Chief  of  the  Great  German  General  Staff,  paid  a  visit 
to  a  certain  home  in  Berlin,  which  shall  be  nameless. 
The  Frau  Generalstabschef  was  in  a  state  of  obvious 
mental  excitement. 

"Ach,  what  a  day  I've  been  through,  Kinder!"  she 
began.  "My  husband  came  home  just  before  I  left. 
Dog-tired,  he  threw  himself  on  to  the  couch,  a  total 
wreck,  explaining  to  me  that  he  had  finally  accom- 
plished the  three  days'  hardest  work  he  had  ever  done 
in  his  whole  life — he  had  helped  to  induce  the  Kaiser 
to  sign  the  mobilization  order !" 

There  is  the  evidence,  disclosed  in  the  homeliest,  yet 


30  THE  ASSAULT 

the  most  direct,  fashion,  of  the  German  War  Party's 
unescapable  culpability  for  the  supreme  crime 
against  humanity.  The  "sword"  had,  indeed,  been 
"forced"  into  the  Kaiser's  hand.  This  is  no  brief  for 
the  Kaiser's  innocence.  No  man  did  more  than  Will- 
iam II  himself,  during  twenty-six  years  of  explosive 
reign,  to  stimulate  the  military  clique  in  the  belief  that 
when  the  dread  hour  came  the  Supreme  War  Lord 
would  be  "with  my  Army."  Yet  German  officers, 
in  those  occasional  moments  when  conviviality  bred 
loquacity,  were  fond  of  averring,  as  more  than  one 
of  them  has  averred  to  me,  that  "the  Kaiser  lacked 
the  moral  courage  to  sign  a  mobilization  order."  Die 
Post,  a  leading  War  Party  organ,  said  as  much  during 
the  Morocco  imbroglio  in  1911.  Perhaps  that  is  why 
General  von  Moltke  had  to  force  the  pen,  which  for 
the  nonce  was  mightier  than  the  sword,  into  the  re- 
luctant hand  of  William  II. 

The  Kaiser  was  constitutionally  addicted  to  swag- 
gering war  talk,  but,  in  my  judgment,  he  preferred 
the  bark  to  the  bite.  He  likes  his  job.  Like  our  Roose- 
velt, he  has  a  "perfectly  corking  time"  wielding  the 
scepter.  Raised  in  the  belief  that  the  Hohenzollerns 
were  divinely  appointed  to  their  Royal  estate,  William 
II  dearly  loves  his  trade.  He  does  not  want  to  lose 
his  throne.  In  peace  there  was  little  danger  of  its  ever 
slipping  from  under  him,  thanks  to  a  Socialist  "move- 
ment" which  was  noisy  but  never  really  menacing.  In 
war  Hohenzollern  rule  is  in  perpetual  peril.  Hostile 
armies,  if  they  ever  battered  their  way  to  Potsdam, 
would  almost  surely  wreck  the  dynasty,  even  if  the 
mob  had  not  already  saved  them  that  trouble.  The 
Kaiser,  sagacious  like  every  man  when  his  livelihood 


JHE   STAGE   MANAGERS  31 

is  at  stake,  always  had  these  dread  eventualities  in 
mind.  His  personal  interests,  the  fortunes  of  his 
House,  all  lay  along  the  path  of  manifest  safety — 
peace.  Meantime  his  concessions  to  the  War  Party 
were  generous  and  frequent.  He  rattled  the  saber  on 
its  demand.  He  donned  his  "shining  armor"  at  Aus- 
tria's side  when  the  Germanic  Powers  coerced  Russia 
into  recognition  of  the  Bosnian  annexation  in  1909. 
He  sent  the  Panther  to  Agadir  harbor  in  1911  be- 
cause the  War  Party  howled  for  "deeds"  in  Morocco. 
It  hoped  that  history  in  Northwestern  Africa  would 
repeat  itself — that  the  Triple  Entente  would  yield  to 
German  bluff  as  it  yielded  in  Southeastern  Europe 
two  years  previous.  It  did  not,  and  it  was  then  that 
the  German  War  Party  swore  a  solemn  vow  of  "Never 
Again!"  The  days  of  the  Kaiser  who  merely  threat- 
ened war  were  numbered.  Next  time  the  sword  would 
be  "forced"  into  his  hand.  "Before  God  and  history 
my  conscience  is  clear.  /  did  not  will  this  war.  One 
year  has  elapsed  since  I  was  obliged  to  call  the  German 
people  to  arms."  Thus  William  of  Hohenzollern's 
manifesto  to  his  people  from  Main  Headquarters  on 
the  first  anniversary  of  the  war,  August  1,  1915. 
Herewith  I  place  Frau  Generalstabschef  von  Moltke 
on  the  stand  as  chief  witness  in  the  Kaiser's  defense. 
I  have  said  that  sixty-six  million  Germans  wanted 
peace  and  one  million  five  hundred  thousand  demanded 
war.  But  in  Germany  minority  rules.  It  rules  su- 
preme when  the  issue  is  war  or  peace,  and  when  the 
German  War  Party  insisted  upon  deeds  instead  of 
speeches  the  nation,  Kaiser  and  all,  Reichstag  and  So- 
cialist, Prince  and  peasant,  had  but  one  alternative — 
to  yield.    In  July,  1914,  the  War  Party  imperiously 


32  THE   ASSAULT 

asked  for  war,  and  war  ensued.  That  is  the  inefface- 
able long  and  short  of  Armageddon.  I  am  persuaded 
that  William  II  on  July  31  was  confronted  with  some- 
thing strangely  like  an  abrupt  alternative  of  mobiliza- 
tion or  abdication. 

Assertions  of  the  German  people's  consecration  to 
peace  may  strike  the  reader  as  incongruous  in  face  of 
the  magnificent  unanimity  with  which  the  entire 
Fatherland  has  waged  and  is  still  waging  the  war. 
But  such  a  view  leaves  wholly  out  of  account  the  most 
prodigious  and  amazing  of  all  the  German  War 
Party's  preparations — the  skilful  manipulation  of 
public  opinion  for  "the  Day."  In  ten  brief  days — ■ 
those  fateful  hours  between  July  23,  when  Austria 
launched  her  brutal  ultimatum  at  Serbia,  and  August 
1,  when  mobilization  of  the  German  Army  and  Navy 
made  a  European  conflagration  a  certainty — Ger- 
many's vast  peace  majority,  by  deception  which  I  shall 
outline  in  a  subsequent  chapter,  was  converted  into  a 
multitudinous  mob  mad  for  war. 

I  count  the  merely  material  preparations  of  the  War 
Party — the  steady  expansion  of  Krupps,  the  develop- 
ment of  the  Fleet,  the  invention  of  the  forty-two 
centimeter  gun,  the  vast  secret  storage  of  arms  and 
ammunition,  the  1913  increase  of  the  Army,  the  accu- 
mulation of  a  war-chest  of  gold,  the  stealthy  organiza- 
tion of  every  conceivable  instrument  and  resource  of 
war  down  to  details  too  minute  for  the  ordinary  mind 
to  grasp ;  all  these,  I  count  as  nothing  compared  to  the 
hypnotization  of  the  German  national  mind  extending 
over  many  years. 

In  England  and  America  the  name  of  Bernhardi 
was  on  everybody's  lips  as  the  archpriest  of  the  war. 


THE    STAGE    MANAGERS  33 

I  doubt  if  one  man  in  ten  thousand  in  Germany  ever 
heard  of  Bernhardi  before  August,  1914.  He  became 
an  international  personality  mainly  through  the  graces 
of  foreign  newspaper  correspondents  in  Berlin,  who, 
recognizing  his  book,  Germany's  Next  War,  as 
classic  proclamation  of  the  War  Party's  designs  on 
the  world,  dignified  it  with  commensurate  atten- 
tion, not  because  of  its  authorship,  but  because  of 
its  innate  authoritativeness.  The  result  was  the 
translation  of  Germany's  Next  War  into  the  Eng- 
lish language,  and  subsequently,  I  suppose,  into  every 
other  civilized  language  in  the  world.  Perhaps  I  am 
myself  to  some  extent  responsible  for  Bernhardi's 
vogue  in  the  United  States.  He  was  going  to  cross 
our  country  en  route  back  to  Europe  from  the  Far 
East,  and  wrote  to  ask  me  to  suggest  to  him  the  name 
of  an  American  translator  and  publisher  for  his  books. 
Bernhardi,  a  mere  retired  general  of  cavalry  with  a 
gift  for  incisive  writing,  woke  up  to  find  himself  fa- 
mous. But  nothing  could  be  more  beyond  the  mark 
than  to  imagine  that  he  was  the  pioneer  of  German 
war-aggression.  He  was  merely  its  most  plain-spoken 
prophet.  The  way  had  been  blazed  for  decades  before 
he  appeared  upon  the  scene.  After  Bernhardi  had 
been  successfully  launched  on  the  bookshelves  of  the 
world,  the  German  War  Party  took  him  up,  and  it  was 
not  long  before  Die  Post,  the  Deutsche  Tageszeitung 
and  other  organs  of  blood-and-iron  were  able  to  make 
"the  highly  gratifying"  announcement  that  Bernhardi's 
manual  had  been  compressed  into  a  fifty-pfennig  pop- 
ular edition,  so  that  the  German  masses  might  be  edu- 
cated in  the  inspiring  doctrine  of  manifest  Teuton  des- 
tiny, as  Bernhardi  so  unblushingly  set  it  forth. 


34  THE   ASSAULT 

The  German  War  Party's  certificate  of  incorpora- 
tion is  dated  Versailles,  January  18,  1871,  when,  on 
the  one  hundred  and  seventieth  anniversary  of  the 
creation  of  the  Kingdom  of  Prussia,  Bismarck  and 
Moltke  crowned  victorious  William  I  of  Prussia  Ger- 
man Emperor.  Cradled  in  Prussianism,  the  German 
War  Party  has  always  been  Prussian,  rather  than  Ger- 
man. To  the  credit  of  Bavaria,  Saxony,  Baden  and 
Wurttemberg  be  that  forever  remembered.  Denmark 
and  Austria,  during  the  seven  years  preceding  Ver- 
sailles, had  had  their  lessons.  Now  France  lay  pros- 
trate, despoiled  of  her  fairest  provinces  and  financially 
bled  white,  as  the  conqueror  imagined.  From  that 
moment  the  Prussian  head  began  swelling  with  invin- 
cible self-esteem,  to  emerge  in  the  succeeding  genera- 
tion in  an  insensate  and  megalomaniac  conviction  that 
to  the  race  which  had  accomplished  what  the  Germans 
had  achieved  nothing  was  impossible.  "World  Power" 
— Rule  or  Ruin — became  the  national  slogan. 

In  the  reconstruction  years  following  the  1870-71 
campaign  non-military  Germany  was  bent  on  laying 
the  foundations  of  Teuton  industrial  greatness.  The 
project  was  vouchsafed  no  support  from  the  military 
hotspurs  who,  within  ten  years  of  Sedan  and  Paris, 
did  their  utmost  to  force  Bismarck  into  giving  hum- 
bled France  a  fresh  drubbing,  that  her  power  to  rise 
from  the  dust  might  be  crushed  for  all  time.  Then 
the  Prussian  War  Party  demanded  that  the  scalp  of 
Russia  be  added  to  its  insatiable  belt.  Bismarck  pro- 
pitiated the  Bernhardis  of  that  day  by  thundering  in 
the  Reichstag  that  "We  Germans  fear  God,  and  noth- 
ing else  in  this  world !"  When  the  Chancellor  of  Iron 
burnt  that  piece  of  bombast  into  the  German  soul  in 


THE   STAGE   MANAGERS  35 

1887,  a  year  before  William  the  Speechmaker  was 
enthroned,  he  wrote  the  German  War  Party's  "plat- 
form." Since  then  it  has  had  many  planks  added  to 
it,  but  all  of  them  have  rested  squarely  and  firmly  on 
the  concrete  upon  which  they  were  imbedded,  viz., 
that  Furor  Teutonicus  was  a  power  which,  when  it 
went  forth  to  slay  and  conquer,  was  invincible  because 
it  was  filled  with  naught  but  the  fear  of  God. 
Nouveau  riche  Germany,  with  France's  one  billion 
two  hundred  and  fifty  million  dollars  of  gold  indemnity 
in  its  pocket,  ceased  to  be  the  Fatherland  of  homely 
virtues,  celebrated  in  song  and  story,  and  became  the 
plethoric  Fatherland,  drunk  with  power  and  wealth 
won  by  arms,  the  Fatherland  which  was  to  adopt  the 
gospel  of  political  brutality  as  a  new  national  Leit- 
motif. "We,  not  the  Jews,  are  God's  chosen  people. 
Our  military  prowess  and  our  intellectual  superiority 
make  German  Weltmacht  manifest  destiny.  Full 
steam  ahead!"  Thus  it  was,  a  generation  ago,  that 
the  German  War  Party  was  launched  on  its  mad 
career. 

During  the  war  the  English-reading  world  has 
heard  much  of  Treitschke  and  Nietzsche,  just  as  it  has 
had  its  ears  dinned  full  of  Bernhardi.  Germans  with 
scars  on  their  faces  and  other  marks  of  a  college  edu- 
cation— a  gentry  numbering  several  millions — know 
and  venerate  their  Treitschke  and  Nietzsche,  and  to 
their  pernicious  dogma  is  due  in  large  degree  the  war 
lust  of  so-called  cultured  Germany ;  yet  to  the  German 
masses  these  renowned  apostles  of  Might  is  Right  are 
little  more  than  names.  Of  far  more  importance  for 
the  purpose  of  tracing  the  origin  of  the  Armageddon 
are  the  living  captains  of  the  "War  Party,"  not  its  de- 


36  THE   ASSAULT 

ceased  intellectual  sponsors.  Historians  of  the  present 
era  will  gain  the  really  illuminating  perspective  by 
relegating  Nietzsche,  "that  half-inspired,  half-crazy 
poet-philosopher,"  and  Treitschke,  his  more  modern 
kindred  spirit,  to  the  dead  past  and  elevating  Tirpitz 
and  the  Crown  Prince,  Koester  of  the  German  Navy 
League  and  Keim  of  the  German  Army  League  to 
their  places.  It  is  men  like  them,  politicians  like 
Heydebrand,  literary  firebrands  like  Reventlow  and 
Frobenius,  and  press-pensioners  like  Hammann  who 
were  the  real  pioneers  of  Armageddon.  These  are 
names  with  which  the  English-reading  world,  en- 
chanted by  the  myopic  prominence  given  to  the  writ- 
ings of  Nietzsche,  Treitschke  and  Bernhardi,  are  not 
familiar.  But  they  are  the  real  stage  managers  of  the 
war  tragedy,  and  it  is  with  them  I  shall  deal  before 
narrating  the  culminating  effects  of  their  devilry. 

Prince  Biilow,  fourth  Imperial  Chancellor  and  most 
urbane  of  statesmen,  will  live  in  German  history  as  a 
man  who  resembled  Bismarck  in  but  one  important 
particular — the  gift  of  phrase-making.  Bismarck's 
aphorisms  are  quoted  by  Germans  with  the  awesome 
regard  in  which  Anglo-Saxons  cite  Shakespeare. 
Billow's  name  will  be  enshrined  in  Teuton  memory 
for  an  epigram  which  had  as  direct  a  psychic  influence 
on  the  German  War  Party's  demand  for  the  present 
war  as  any  other  one  thing  said,  written  or  done  in 
Germany  in  the  last  fifteen  years.  When  he  pro- 
claimed that  Germany  demanded  her  "place  in  the 
sun,"  he  flung  into  the  fire  fat  which  was  to  go  sizzling 
down  the  age.  It  was  worth  its  weight  in  precious 
gems  to  the  blood-and-iron  brigade.  As  Bismarck's 
blasphemous  bluster  in  1887  gave  the  War  Party  of 


THE   STAGE   MANAGERS  37 

that  day  its  fillip,  Btilow  in  1907  supplied  the  spurred 
and  helmeted  zealots  of  his  era  with  a  flamboyancy  no 
less  vicious.  They  snatched  it  up  with  alacrity,  and, 
being  Germans,  proceeded  to  exploit  it  with  masterly 
efficiency  and  deadly  thoroughness.  A  "place  in  the 
sun"  forthwith  inspired  an  entirely  new  German  lit- 
erature.   It  became  the  spiritual  mother  of  this  war. 

Like  all  the  War  Party's  dogma,  the  "place  in  the 
sun"  doctrine  is  sheer  cant.  Germany  has  occupied  an 
increasingly  expansive  "place  in  the  sun"  for  forty- 
four  years  without  interruption.  In  1913,  Doctor  Karl 
Helfferich,  a  director  of  the  Deutsche  Bank,  who  is 
now  Secretary  of  the  Imperial  Treasury,  in  a  pamphlet 
spread  broadcast  throughout  the  world,  thus  summar- 
ized Germany's  "place  in  the  sun": 

"The  German  National  Income  amounts  today  to 
ten  thousand  seven  hundred  fifty  million  dollars  an- 
nually as  against  from  five  thousand  seven  hundred 
fifty  to  six  thousand  two  hundred  fifty  million  dollars 
in  1895.  The  annual  increase  in  wealth  is  about  two 
thousand  five  hundred  million  dollars,  as  against  a 
sum  of  from  one  thousand  one  hundred  twenty-five  to 
one  thousand  two  hundred  fifty  million  dollars  fifteen 
years  ago. 

"The  wealth  of  the  German  people  amounts  today 
to  more  than  seventy-five  thousand  million  dollars,  as 
against  about  fifty  thousand  million  dollars  toward 
the  middle  of  the  nineties.  These  solid  figures  sum- 
marize, expressed  in  money,  the  result  of  the  enormous 
economic  labor  which  Germany  has  achieved  during 
the  reign  of  our  present  Emperor." 

Doctor  Helfferich  continued  the  story  of  the  inces- 
sant widening  of  the  Fatherland's  "place  in  the  sun."  He 


38  THE   ASSAULT 

told  of  the  steady  rise  of  the  population  at  the  rate  of 
eight  hundred  thousand  a  year;  of  the  development  of 
German  industry  at  so  miraculous  a  pace  that  while 
Germany  in  the  middle  eighties  was  losing  emigrated 
citizens  at  the  rate  of  one  hundred  thirty-five  thousand 
a  year,  the  total  had  sunk  in  1912  to  eighteen  thousand 
five  hundred,  and  that  Germany  had  become,  many 
years  before  that  date,  an  importer  of  men,  instead  of 
an  exporter;  that  the  net  tonnage  of  the  German  mer- 
cantile fleet  increased  from  1,240,182  in  1888  to 
3,153,724  in  1913;  that  German  imports  and  exports, 
during  the  rich  years  immediately  prior  to  1910,  in- 
creased from  one  thousand  five  hundred  million  dol- 
lars to  nearly  four  thousand  million  dollars,  and  in 
1912  exceeded  five  thousand  millions. 

By  a  "place  in  the  sun"  Prince  Biilow  meant,  pri- 
marily, territorial  expansion  for  Germany's  "surplus 
population."  Yet  even  in  this  respect  German  aggran- 
dizement kept  pace  with  her  fabulous  economic  de- 
velopment. When  war  broke  out  in  1914,  the  German 
colonial  empire  oversea  was  hundreds  of  thousands  of 
square  miles  more  extensive  than  Germany  in  Europe. 
It  is  true  that  the  Germans  went  in  for  colonial  land- 
grabbing  late  in  the  game,  after  England,  particularly, 
had  acquired  the  best  territory  in  both  hemispheres, 
and  many  years  after  the  Monroe  Doctrine  had  effec- 
tually checked  European  expansion  in  the  Americas. 
As  the  result  of  "colonial  empire"  in  inferior  regions 
of  the  earth,  the  total  white  population  of  German 
colonies  in  1913  was  less  than  twenty-eight  thousand, 
or  roundly,  three  and  one-half  per  cent,  of  the  annual 
growth  of  German  population.  Although  acquired 
nominally  for  "trade,"  Germany's  commerce  with  her 


THE    STAGE    MANAGERS  39 

colonies  in  imports  and  exports  totaled  in  1914  a  frac- 
tion more  than  twenty-five  million  dollars,  or  about 
one-half  of  one  per  cent,  of  Germany's  total  trade  of 
five  thousand  million  dollars  in  1912.  Germany's  lust 
for  a  larger  "place  in  the  sun,"  as  it  has  been  aptly 
described  by  the  author  of  J' Accuse,  is  "square-mile 
greed,"  pure  and  simple,  and  as  the  same  frank  and 
brilliant  writer  points  out,  Germany  not  only  demands 
a  "place  in  the  sun,"  but  claims  it  for  herself  alone,  in- 
sisting that  the  rest  of  the  world  shall  content  itself 
with  "a  place  in  the  shade." 

To  popularize  the  "place  in  the  sun"  theory  two 
great  German  national  organizations  went  valiantly 
to  work — the  Pan-German  League  and  the  German 
Navy  League.  The  Pan-Germans,  whose  efforts 
were  seconded  by  a  subsidiary  society  called  the  Asso- 
ciation for  the  Perpetuation  of  Germanism  Abroad, 
set  themselves  the  task  of  educating  German  public 
opinion  in  regard  to  "the  bitter  need"  of  a  "Greater 
Germany,"  to  be  achieved  by  hook  or  crook.  The  Ger- 
man Navy  League  dedicated  itself  to  fomenting  agita- 
tion designed  to  meet  the  Kaiser's  expressed  "bitter 
need"  of  vast  German  sea  power.  Ostensibly  private 
in  character,  both  of  these  militant  propaganda  organi- 
zations enjoyed  more  or  less  official  countenance  and 
support.  On  occasion,  when  their  activities  appeared 
too  pernicious  or  threatened  to  obstruct  the  subtle 
machinations  of  German  diplomacy,  the  Government 
would  convincingly  "disavow"  the  leagues.  But  all 
the  time  they  were  working  for  Germany's  "place  in 
the  sun."  Under  their  auspices,  the  country  for  years 
was  drenched  with  belligerent  and  provocative  litera- 
ture, which  harped  ceaselessly  on  the  theme  that  what 


40  THE   ASSAULT 

1  Germany  could  not  secure  by  diplomacy  she  must  pre- 
pare to  extort  by  the  sword. 

As  the  Pan-Germans  and  the  Navy  League  cher- 
ished twin  aspirations,  it  was  not  surprising  that  two 
men,  General  Keim,  a  retired  officer  of  the  army,  and 
Count  Ernst  zu  Reventlow,  a  retired  officer  of  the 
navy,  should  be  moving  spirits  in  both  organizations. 
General  Keim,  in  his  zeal  to  support  Admiral  von  Tir- 
pitz's  big  navy  schemes,  eventually  went  to  such  ex- 
tremes in  the  pursuit  of  his  duties  as  president  of  the 
Navy  League  that  the  organization's  existence  as  a 
national  association  was  momentarily  threatened.  It 
was  giving  the  game  away.  Keim  was  thereupon  re- 
moved from  his  position,  to  be  succeeded  by  the  Grand 
Old  Man  of  the  German  Fleet,  Grand-Admiral  von 
Koester.  Koester  was  suaviter  in  modo,  but  no  less 
fortiter  in  re  than  Keim.  Entering  the  presidency  of 
the  Navy  League  in  the  midst  of  the  Dreadnought 
era,  when  Germany's  dream  of  her  "future  upon  the 
water"  was  sweetest,  his  systematic  fanning  of  the 
public  temper,  especially  against  England,  left  nothing 
to  be  desired. 

General  Keim,  deposed  from  the  leadership  of  the 
Navy  League,  was  presently  kicked  up-stairs  by  the 
German  War  Party  and  made  president  of  the  newly- 
formed  "German  Defense  League."  This  association 
was  organized  to  launch  a  national  agitation  in  favor 
of  increasing  the  German  military  establishment. 

The  methods  which  had  caused  Keim's  "downfall" 
from  the  presidency  of  the  Navy  League  were 
promptly  employed  by  him  in  the  new  army  league. 
With  a  host  of  influential  newspapers  and  "war  indus- 
try" interests  at  their  back,  plus  the  benevolent  patron- 


THE   STAGE   MANAGERS  41 

age  of  the  Imperial  family  and  Government,  Koester 
and  Keim  carried  out  for  six  years  preceding  August, 
1914,  the  most  prodigious  and  audacious  propaganda 
crusade  in  European  history.  Germany's  need  for  "a 
place  in  the  sun,"  on  whatever  particular  chord  they 
harped,  was  always  their  keynote.  The  "Defense 
League"  scored  its  crowning  triumph  in  1913  by  ac- 
complishing the  passage  of  the  celebrated  Army  Bill 
whereby  the  land  forces  of  the  Empire  were  aug- 
mented at  an  expense  of  two  hundred  fifty  million 
dollars — the  immediate  preliminary  step  to  the  assault 
of  Europe  by  the  Kaiser's  legions. 

Count  Reventlow,  a  Jingo  of  Jingoes,  rendered  both 
the  navy  and  army  leagues  valiant  support  in  the 
columns  of  his  newspaper,  the  Deutsche  Tageszeitung, 
and  in  a  regular  grist  of  pamphlets  and  books  which 
his  facile  pen  from  time  to  time  reeled  off.  Reventlow 
was  one  of  the  archpriests  of  the  War  Party.  A 
champion  hater  of  everything  foreign,  he  was  tem- 
peramentally fitted  to  advocate  the  doctrine  of  Force 
and  Germany's  right  to  world-conquest  by  fire  and 
sword.  Count  Reventlow,  whom  it  was  my  pleasure 
to  know  intimately,  hated  England,  France  and  Russia 
with  a  ferocity  delightful  to  behold.  His  Franco- 
phobism  was  little  diminished  by  his  marriage  to  a 
charming  French  noblewoman.  He  hated  America, 
too.  I  could  never  quite  divine  the  gallant  Count's 
reason  for  eating  an  American  alive,  in  his  mind,  every 
morning  for  breakfast,  and  for  despising  us  as  cor- 
dially as  he  detested  Mr.  Winston  Churchill,  Monsieur 
Delcasse  or  the  Czar,  until  he  confessed  to  me  one  day 
that  he  lost  a  fortune  through  unfortunate  speculation 
in  a  Florida  fruit  plantation.     Thenceforth,  appar- 


42  THE   ASSAULT 

ently,  Reventlow's  anti-Americanism  knew  no  bounds. 
It  was  more  explosive  than  usual  during  his  discussion 
of  the  Lusitania  massacre,  but  it  was  pathological. 

A  pillar  of  the  German  War  Party,  whose  name  is 
almost  entirely  unknown  abroad,  is  Doctor  Hammann, 
chief  of  the  notorious  Press  Bureau  of  the  German 
Foreign  Office  and  Imperial  Chancellery.  Hammann 
for  twenty  years,  because  one  of  the  craftiest,  has  been 
one  of  the  most  powerful  men  in  German  politics.  For 
two  decades  he  survived  the  incessant  vicissitudes  and 
intrigues  of  the  Foreign  Office,  which  indeed  were 
more  than  once  of  his  own  making.  He  was  frequently 
credited  with  being  "the  real  Chancellor"  in  Billow's 
days  because  of  his  sinister  influence  over  that  suave 
statesman.  Hammann's  nominal  duties  were  confined 
to  manipulating  the  German  press  for  the  Govern- 
ment's purposes  and  to  exercising  such  "control"  over 
the  Berlin  correspondents  of  foreign  newspapers  as 
might  from  time  to  time  appear  feasible  or  possible. 
Himself  a  retired  journalist  of  unsavory  reputation — 
he  was  a  few  years  ago  under  indictment  for  perjury 
in  an  unlovely  domestic  scandal — he  seemed  to  his 
superiors  an  ideal  personage  to  deal  with  the  Fourth 
Estate,  which  Bismarck  trained  Germans  to  look  upon 
as  "the  reptile  press."  Hammann's  function,  for  the 
War  Party's  purposes,  was  to  mislead  public  opinion, 
at  home  and  abroad,  as  to  the  real  intentions  and 
machinations  of  Weltpolitik.  Under  his  shrewd  direc- 
tion German  newspapers,  restlessly  propagating  the 
Fatherland's  need  for  "a  place  in  the  sun,"  systemat- 
ically distorted  the  international  situation  so  as  to  rep- 
resent Germany  as  the  innocent  lamb  and  all  other 
nations  as  ravenous  wolves  howling  for  her  immacu* 


THE    STAGE    MANAGERS  43 

late  blood.  That  Hammann  is  regarded  as  having  ren- 
dered "our  just  cause"  priceless  service  was  proved 
only  a  few  months  ago  by  his  promotion  to  a  full 
division-directorship  in  the  Foreign  Office.  He  had 
hitherto  ranked  merely  as  a  Wirklicher  Geheimrat,  or 
sub-official  of  the  department,  although  as  a  matter  of 
fact  five  Foreign  Secretaries,  "under"  whom  he  nom- 
inally served,  were  mere  putty  in  the  hands  of  Ger- 
many's Imperial  Press  Agent-in-Chief. 

Grand-Admiral  von  Tirpitz,  of  course,  has  for  years 
been  one  of  the  super-pillars  of  the  German  War 
Party.  The  Kaiser's  Fleet  is  the  creation  of  von 
Tirpitz,  though  William  II  receives  popular  credit  for 
the  achievement,  and  von  Tirpitz  created  it  essentially 
for  war.  Von  Tirpitz  once  honored  me  with  a  heart- 
to-heart  confab  on  Anglo-German  naval  rivalry.  He 
rebuked  me  in  a  paternal  way  for  specializing  in  Ger- 
man naval  news.  Germany  had  no  ulterior  motive,  he 
said.  She  was  building  a  defensive  fleet  primarily, 
though  one  that  would  be  strong  enough,  on  occasion, 
to  "throw  into  the  balance  of  international  politics  a 
weight  commensurate  with  Germany's  status  as  a 
World  Power."  Von  Tirpitz  was  the  incarnation  of 
the  naval  spirit  which  longed  for  the  chance  to  show  the 
world  that  Germany  at  sea  was  as  "glorious"  as  cen- 
turies of  martial  history  had  proved  her  on  land.  Ger- 
man sailors  chafed  under  the  corroding  restraint  of 
peace.  They  hankered  for  laurels.  They  were  tired 
of  manning  a  dress-parade  fleet,  whose  functions 
seemed  to  be  confined  to  holding  spectacular  reviews 
for  the  Kaiser's  glorification  at  Kiel.  They  hungered 
for  "the  Day."  Von  Tirpitz  has  denied  passionately 
that  they  ever  drank  to  "the  Day"  in  their  battleship 


44  THE   ASSAULT 

messes.  But  it  was  the  unspoken  prayer  which  lulled 
them  to  well-earned  sleep,  for  in  consequence  of  the 
iron  discipline  and  remorseless  labor  which  von  Tirpitz 
imposed  on  his  officers  and  men  in  anticipation  of 
"Germany's  Trafalgar,"  the  Kaiser's  Fleet  was  the 
hardest  worked  navy  in  the  world.  No  Armada  in 
history  was  ever  so  perpetually  "battle-ready"  as  the 
German  High  Seas  Fleet.  It  was  the  Fleet  which 
made  its  very  own  that  other  hypocritical  German  bat- 
tle-cry, "The  Freedom  of  the  Sea,"  which  means,  of 
course,  a  German-ruled  sea. 

Von  Tirpitz's  task  was  not  only  to  build  the  fleet 
but  to  agitate  German  public  opinion  uninterruptedly 
in  favor  of  its  constant  expansion.  To  him  and  the 
Navy  League,  which  he  controlled,  and  to  his  Press 
Bureau  and  its  swarm  of  journalistic  and  literary 
parasites,  were  due  the  remarkable  Anglophobe  cam- 
paigns which  resulted  in  the  desired  periodical  additions 
to  the  Fleet.  A  politician  of  consummate  talent,  von 
Tirpitz  held  successive  Reichstags  in  the  palm  of  his 
hand.  No  Imperial  Chancellor,  though  nominally  his 
chief,  was  ever  able  to  override  the  imperious  will  of 
von  Tirpitz  the  Eternal.  Repeatedly  in  the  years  pre- 
ceding the  war  England  held  out  the  hand  of  a  naval 
entente.  The  War  Party  and  von  Tirpitz  said  "No !" 
And  Armageddon  became  as  inevitable  as  the  setting 
sun. 

I  have  enumerated  only  the  outstanding  figures  of 
the  German  War  Party.  They  could  be  supplemented 
at  will — there  are  the  men  like  Professor  von 
Schmoller,  of  the  University  of  Berlin,  who  foresees 
the  day  when  "a  nation  of  two  hundred  million  Ger- 
mans oversea  would  rise  in  Southern  Brazil" ;  or  Pro- 


THE    STAGE    MANAGERS  45 

fessor  Adolf  Lasson,  also  of  Berlin,  who  proclaimed 
the  doctrine  that  Germans'  "cultural  paramountcy  over 
all  other  nations"  entitles  them  to  hegemony  over  the 
earth;  or  Professor  Adolf  Wagner,  the  Berlin  econo- 
mist, who  excoriates  compulsory  arbitration  as  the 
refuge  of  the  politically  impotent  and  a  dogma  be- 
neath the  dignity  of  the  Germany  of  the  Hohenzol- 
lerns;  or  the  whole  dynasty  of  politician-professors 
like  Delbriick,  Zorn,  Liszt,  Edward  and  Kuno  Meyer, 
Eucken,  Haeckel,  Harnack,  or  minor  theorists  like 
Miinsterberg,  who  year  in  and  year  out  preached  the 
doctrine  of  Teutonic  superiority,  Teutonic  invincibility 
and  Teutonic  "world  destiny."  These  intellectual  aux- 
iliaries of  the  War  Party  in  their  day  have  sent  tens 
of  thousands  of  young  men  out  of  German  universi- 
ties with  politically  polluted  minds.  Their  class-rooms 
have  been  the  real  breeding  ground  and  recruiting 
camps  of  the  German  War  Party. 

And  then,  of  course,  in  addition  to  the  admirals 
who  wanted  war,  and  the  professors  who  glorified 
war,  and  the  editors,  pamphleteers,  Navy  and  Army 
League  leaders  and  paid  agitators  who  wrote  and 
talked  war,  there  was  the  German  Army,  represented 
by  its  corj>s  of  fifty  thousand  or  sixty  thousand  offi- 
cers, whicKwas  the  living,  ineradicable  incarnation  of 
war  and  with  every  breath  it  drew  sighed  impatiently 
for  its  coming.  I  suppose  armies  in  all  countries  more 
or  less  constitute  "war  parties."  But  never  in  our 
time  has  an  army  tingled  and  spoiled  for  battle  as 
sleeplessly  as  the  legions  of  the  Kaiser.  It  was  written 
in  the  stars  that  it  was  only  a  question  of  time  when 
they  would  realize  their  aspiration  to  prove  that  the 
German  war  machine  of  the  day  was  not  only  the  peer, 


46  THE   ASSAULT 

but  incomparably  the  superior,  of  the  Juggernauts  with 
the  aid  of  which  Frederick  the  Great  and  Moltke  re- 
mapped Europe. 

But  the  Grand  Mogul  of  the  German  War  Party, 
its  pet,  darling  and  patron  saint,  was  Crown  Prince 
William,  the  Kaiser's  ebullient  heir  who  contributed  so 
conspicuously  to  Germany's  loss  of  Paris  in  September, 
1914.  For  ten  years  he  was  the  apple  of  the  army's 
eye.  William  IPs  oratorical  peace  palaverings  long 
ago  convinced  his  military  paladins  that  their  hopes 
could  no  longer  with  safety  be  pinned  on  the  monarch 
who  would  do  nothing  but  rattle  his  saber.  "A  place 
in  the  sun"  could  never  be  achieved  by  such  tactics, 
they  argued,  so  they  transferred  their  affections  and 
their  expectations  to  the  "young  man"  who  cheered 
in  the  Reichstag  when  his  father's  Government  was 
accused  of  cowardice  in  Morocco.  They  placed  their 
destinies  in  the  keeping  of  the  Imperial  hotspur  who 
wrote  in  his  book,  Germany  in  Arms,  that  "visionary 
dreams  of  everlasting  peace  throughout  the  world  are 
un-German."  Their  real  allegiance  was  sworn  hence- 
forth to  the  swashbuckling  young  buffoon,  who,  taking 
leave  of  the  Death's  Head  Hussars  after  two  years' 
colonelcy,  admonished  them  to  "think  of  him  whose 
most  ardent  desire  it  has  always  been  to  be  allowed  to 
share  at  your  side  the  supreme  moment  of  a  soldier's 
happiness — when  the  King  calls  to  arms  and  the  bugle 
sounds  the  charge !"  It  was  an  open  secret  that  when 
the  Crown  Prince  was  exiled  to  the  command  of  a 
cavalry  regiment  in  dreamy  Danzig,  far  away  from 
the  frenzied  plaudits  of  the  multitude  in  Berlin,  the 
Kaiser's  action  was  inspired  by  the  disquieting  reali- 
sation that  his  heir  was  acquiring  a  popularity,  both 


THE   STAGE   MANAGERS  47 

in  and  out  of  the  army,  which  boded  ill  for  the  security 
of  the  monarch's  own  status  with  his  subjects. 

These,  then,  are  the  men,  and  these  their  principal 
methods,  which  provided  the  scenario  for  the  impend- 
ing clash.  As  with  every  great  "production,"  pre- 
liminary plans  were  well  and  truly  laid.  Rehearsals, 
in  the  form  of  stupendous  maneuvers  on  "a  strictly 
warlike  basis,"  had  brought  the  chief  actors,  scene 
shifters  and  other  accessories  to  first-night  pitch.  The 
stage  managers'  work  was  done.  They  had  now  only 
to  take  their  appointed  places  in  the  flies  and  wings 
and  let  the  tragedy  proceed.  The  rest  could  be  left  to 
the  puppets  on  both  sides  of  the  footlights.  A  month 
of  slow  music,  and  then  the  grand  finale. 


CHAPTER  V 

SLOW  MUSIC 

JULY  in  Berlin  of  the  red  summer  of  1914  began 
as  placidly  as  a  feast  day  in  Utopia.  The  electric 
shock  of  Serajevo  soon  spent  its  force.  Germans 
seemed  to  be  vastly  more  concerned  over  the  effect 
of  the  Archduke's  assassination  on  the  health  of  the 
old  Austrian  Emperor  than  over  resultant  interna- 
tional complications.  It  was  Sir  Edward  Goschen, 
British  Ambassador  in  Berlin,  previously  accredited 
to  the  Vienna  court,  who  recalled  to  me  Francis 
Joseph's  once-expressed  determination  to  outlive  his 
heir.  The  doddering  octogenarian  had  realized  his 
grim  ambition. 

The  German  Emperor  returned  to  Berlin  from 
Kiel  on  Monday,  the  30th  of  June.  Ties  of  deep 
affection  united  him  to  his  aged  Austrian  ally.  It  was 
universally  assumed  that  the  Kaiser,  with  character- 
istic impetuosity,  would  rush  to  Vienna  to  comfort 
Francis  Joseph  and  attend  the  Archduke's  funeral. 
So,  as  events  developed,  he  ardently  desired  to  do; 
but  intimations  speedily  arrived  from  the  Hofburg 
that  "Kaiser  Franz"  had  chosen  to  carry  his  newest 
cross  unmolested  by  the  flummery  and  circumstance  of 
State  obsequies,  and  William  II  remained  in  Berlin 
for  honorary  funeral  services  in  his  own  cathedral  in 
memory  of  the  august  departed.     Some  day  a  his- 

48 


SLOW   MUSIC  49 

torian,  who  will  have  great  things  to  tell,  may  relate 
the  real  reason  for  the  baffling  of  the  Kaiser's  desire 
to  play  the  role  of  chief  mourner  at  spectacular  death- 
rites  in  the  other  German  capital.  He  had  telegraphed 
the  orphans  of  the  murdered  Archduke  and  Duchess 
that  his  "heart  was  bleeding  for  them."  Men  who 
have  an  X-ray  knowledge  of  Imperial  William's  psy- 
chology were  unkind  enough  to  suggest  that  he  longed 
to  parade  himself  before  the  mourning  populace  of  the 
Austrian  metropolis  as  Lohengrin  in  the  hour  of  its 
woe,  an  Emperor  on  whom  it  were  safer  to  lean  than 
on  the  decrepit  figurehead  now  bowed  in  impotent 
grief,  with  a  beardless  grand-nephew  of  an  heir  ap- 
parent as  the  sole  hope  of  the  trembling  future. 

Until  the  late  Archduke  Francis  Ferdinand  began  to 
assert  himself,  William  II's  influence  at  Vienna  had 
been  profound.  Francis  Joseph  liked  and  trusted  him. 
Austria  was  frequently  governed  from  Potsdam. 
With  the  great  bar  to  his  ascendency  removed  from 
the  scene,  the  German  Emperor  may  well  have  thought 
the  hour  at  length  arrived  for  the  virile  Hohenzollerns 
to  save  the  crumbling  Hapsburgs  from  themselves, 
and  invertebrate  Austria-Hungary  from  the  Haps- 
burgs. But  Vienna  decided  it  was  better  the  Kaiser 
should  stay  at  home.  His  political  physicians,  on  the 
evening  of  July  1,  suddenly  discovered  that  His 
Majesty  was  suffering  from  that  famous  German 
malady  known  as  "diplomatic  illness,"  whereupon  the 
court  M.  D.  dutifully  announced,  through  the  obliging 
official  news-agency,  that  "owing  to  a  slight  attack  of 
lumbago"  the  Kaiser  would  not  attend  the  funeral  of 
the  murdered  Archduke,  "as  had  been  arranged." 
Forty-eight  hours  later  other  "face-saving"  procedure 


50  THE   ASSAULT 

was  carried  out — the  Viennese  court  proclaimed  that 
by  the  express  wish  of  the  Emperor  Francis  Joseph, 
no  foreign  guests  of  any  nationality  were  expected  to 
attend  the  Royal  obsequies. 

On  Monday,  July  6,  William's  "lumbago"  having 
yielded  to  treatment,  there  was  sprung  one  of  the  most 
dramatic  of  all  the  coups  which  preceded  the  fructifica- 
tion of  the  German  War  Party's  now  fast-completing 
conspiracy.  Although  martial  law  was  being  ruth- 
lessly enforced  in  Bosnia  and  Herzogovina  and  all 
Austria-Hungary  was  in  a  state  of  rising  ferment 
over  the  "expiation"  which  public  opinion  insisted  "the 
Serbian  murderers"  must  render,  the  Kaiser's  mind 
was  made  up  for  him  that  the  international  situation 
was  sufficiently  placid  for  him  to  start  on  his  annual 
holiday  cruise  to  the  North  Cape.  Four  days  previ- 
ous, July  2,  though  the  world  was  not  to  know  it  till 
many  weeks  afterward,  the  military  governor  of  Ger- 
man Southwest  Africa  unexpectedly  informed  a  num- 
ber of  German  officers  in  the  colony  that  they  might 
go  home  on  special  leave  if  they  could  catch  the  out- 
going steamer.  These  officers  reached  Germany  dur- 
ing the  first  week  in  August,  to  find  orders  awaiting 
them  to  join  their  regiments  in  the  field.  Notifications 
issued  to  Austrian  subjects  in  distant  countries  were 
subsequently  found  also  to  bear  date  of  July  2.  Things 
were  moving. 

The  Hohenzollern  steamed  away  to  the  fjords 
of  Norway  with  the  Kaiser  and  his  customary  com- 
pany of  congenial  spirits.  The  Government-controlled 
Lokal-Anzeiger  and  other  journalistic  handmaids  of 
officialdom  forthwith  proclaimed  that  "with  his  old- 
time  tact  our  Emperor,  by  pursuing  the  even  tenor  of 


SLOW   MUSIC  51 

his  way,  gives  us  and  the  world  this  gratifying  and 
convincing  sign  that  however  menacing  the  storm- 
clouds  in  the  Southeast  may  seem,  lieb'  Vaterland  mag 
ruhig  sein.  All  is  well  with  Germany."  Or  words  to 
that  effect.  Germany  and  Europe  were  thus  effectu- 
ally lulled  into  a  false  sense  of  security,  for,  as  one 
read  further  in  other  "inspired"  German  newspapers, 
"our  patriotic  Emperor  is  not  the  man  to  withdraw  his 
hand  from  the  helm  of  State  if  peril  were  in  the  air." 
So  off  went  the  Kaiser  to  his  beloved  Bergen,  Trond- 
hjem  and  Tromso  to  flatter  the  Norwegians  as  he 
had  done  for  twenty  summers  previous  and  to  shake 
hands  with  the  tourists  who  always  "booked"  cabins  in 
the  Hamburg-American  North  Cape  steamers  in  an- 
ticipation of  the  distinction  the  Kaiser  never  failed 
to  bestow  upon  Herr  Ballin's  patrons. 

The  Kaiser's  departure  from  Germany  was  partic- 
ularly well  timed  to  bolster  up  the  fiction  subsequently 
so  insistently  propagated,  that  Austria's  impending 
coercion  of  Serbia  was  none  of  Germany's  doing.  The 
Hohenzollern  had  hardly  slipped  out  of  Baltic 
waters  when  Vienna's  "diplomatic  demarche"  at  Bel- 
grade began.  It  was  specifically  asserted  that  these 
"representations"  would  be  "friendly."  Europe  must 
under  no  circumstances,  thus  early  in  the  game,  be 
roused  from  its  midsummer  siesta.  The  official  bul- 
letin from  the  Hohenzollern  read:  "All's  well  on 
board.  His  Majesty  listened  to-day  to  a  learned 
treatise  on  Slav  archeology  by  Professor  Theodor 
Schiemann.  To-morrow  the  Kaiser  will  inspect  the 
Fridthjof  statue  which  he  presented  to  the  Norwegian 
people  three  years  ago." 

Austria-Hungary   has   a   press   bureau,    too,    and 


52  THE   ASSAULT 

doubtless  a  Hammann  of  its  own;  now  it  cleared  for 
action.  While  Vienna's  "friendly  representations" 
were  in  progress  at  Belgrade,  the  papers  of  Vienna 
and  Budapest  began  sounding  the  tocsin  for  "vigor- 
ous" prosecution  of  the  Dual  Monarchy's  case  against 
the  Serbian  assassins  and  their  accessories.  The  Ser- 
bian Government  meantime  remained  imperturbable. 
Princip  and  Cabrinovitch,  the  takers  of  the  Archduke 
and  Duchess'  lives,  after  all  were  Austrian-Hungarian 
subjects,  and  their  crime  was  committed  on  Austrian- 
Hungarian  soil.  Serbia,  said  Belgrade,  must  be  proved 
guilty  of  responsibility  for  Serajevo  before  she  could 
be  expected  to  accept  it.  Then  the  Berlin  press  bureau 
took  the  field.  The  Lokal-Anzeiger  "admitted"  that 
things  were  beginning  to  look  as  if  "Germany  will 
again  have  to  prove  her  Nibelung  loyalty,"  i.  e.,  in  sup- 
port of  Austria,  as  during  the  other  Bosnian  crisis,  in 
1909. 

By  the  end  of  the  second  week  of  July  the  world's 
most  sensitive  recording  instruments,  the  stock  ex- 
changes, commenced  to  vibrate  with  the  tremors  of 
brewing  unrest.  The  Bourse  at  Vienna  was  disturb- 
ingly weak.  Berlin  responded  with  sympathetic 
slumps.  To  the  Daily  Mail  in  London  and  the  New 
York  Times  I  was  able,  on  the  night  of  July  10,  to 
cable  the  significant  message  that  the  German  Imperial 
Bank  was  now  putting  pressure  on  all  German  banks 
to  induce  them  to  keep  ten  per  cent,  of  their  deposits 
and  assets  on  hand  in  money.  On  the  same  day  an 
unexplained  tragedy  occurred  in  Belgrade :  the  Russian 
minister  to  the  Serbian  court,  Monsieur  de  Hartwig, 
Germanism's  arch- foe  in  the  Balkans,  died  suddenly 


SLOW   MUSIC  53 

while  taking  tea  with  his  Austrian  diplomatic  colleague, 
Baron  Giesling. 

Germany  the  while  was  going  about  its  business, 
which  at  mid-July  consists  principally  in  slowing  down 
the  strenuous  life  and  extending  mere  nocturnal  "bum- 
meling"  in  home  haunts  to  seashore,  forests  and  moun- 
tains for  protracted  sojourns  of  weeks  and  months. 
The  "cure"  resorts  were  crowded.  In  the  al  fresco  res- 
taurants in  the  cities,  one  could  hear  the  Germans  eat- 
ing and  drinking  as  of  peaceful  yore.  The  schools  were 
closed  and  Stettiner  Bahnhof,  which  leads  to  the  Baltic, 
and  Lehrter  Bahnhof,  the  gateway  to  the  North  Sea, 
were  choked  from  early  morning  till  late  at  night  with 
excited  and  perspiring  Berliners  off  for  their  prized 
Sommerfrische.  Herr  Bankdirektor  Meyer  and  Herr 
and  Frau  Rechtsanwalt  Salzmann  were  a  good  deal 
more  interested  in  the  food  at  the  Logierhaus  they  had 
selected  for  themselves  and  the  kinder  at  Heringsdorf 
or  Westerland-Sylt  than  they  were  in  Austria's  aveng-^ 
ing  diplomatic  moves  in  Belgrade.  Stock-brokers  were 
only  moderately  nervous  over  the  gyrations  of  the 
Bourse.  Germans  who  had  not  yet  made  off  for  the 
seaside  or  the  Tyrol  felt  surer  than  ever  that  war  was 
a  chimera  when  they  read  that  Monsieur  Humbert 
had  just  revealed  to  the  French  Senate  the  criminal 
unpreparedness  of  the  Republic's  military  establish- 
ment. 

Strain  between  Austria  and  Serbia  was  now  increas- 
ing. Canadian  Pacific,  German  stock-dabblers'  favor- 
ite "flyer,"  tumbled  on  the  Vienna  and  Berlin  Bourses 
to  the  lowest  level  reached  since  1910.  Real  war 
rumors  now  cropped  up.     Austria  was  reported  to 


54  THE   ASSAULT 

have  "partially  mobilized"  two  army  corps.  Canadian 
Pacifies  continued  to  be  "unloaded"  by  nervous  Ger- 
mans in  quantities  unprecedented.  Now  Serbia  was 
"reported"  to  be  mobilizing.  It  was  July  17.  England, 
we  gathered  in  Berlin,  was  thinking  only  of  Ireland. 
Berlin  correspondents  of  great  London  dailies  who 
were  trying  to  impress  the  British  public  with  the 
gravity  of  the  European  situation  had  their  dispatches 
edited  down  to  back-page  dimensions — if  they  were 
printed  at  all.  One  colleague,  who  represented  a  fa- 
mous English  Liberal  newspaper,  had  arranged,  weeks 
before,  to  start  on  his  holidays  at  the  end  of  July. 
He  telegraphed  his  editor  that  he  thought  it  advisable 
to  abandon  his  preparations  and  to  remain  in  Berlin. 
"See  no  occasion  for  any  alteration  of  your  arrange- 
ments," was  wired  back  from  Fleet  Street. 

The  German  War  Party,  acting  through  Hammann, 
now  perpetrated  another  grim  little  witticism.  It  was 
solemnly  announced  in  the  Berlin  press — on  July  18 — 
that  the  third  squadron  of  the  German  High  Seas 
Fleet  was  to  be  "sent  to  an  English  port  in  August  (  !) 
to  return  the  visit  lately  paid  to  Kiel  by  a  British 
squadron."  Britain's  Grand  Armada  the  while  was 
assembled  off  Spithead  for  the  mightiest  naval  review 
in  history — two  hundred  and  thirty  vessels  manned  by 
seventy  thousand  officers  and  men.  King  George 
spent  Sunday,  July  19,  quietly  at  sea,  steaming  up  and 
down  the  endless  lines  of  dreadnoughts  and  lesser 
ironclads.  The  Lord  Mayor  of  London  opened  a  new 
golf  course  at  Croydon.    And  Ulster  was  smoldering. 

Highly  instructive  now  were  the  recriminations  go- 
ing on  in  the  German,  Austrian  and  Serbian  press. 
Belgrade  denied  that  reserves  had  been  called  up.    The 


SLOW   MUSIC  55 

North  German  Gazette,  the  official  mouthpiece  of  the 
Kaiser's  Government,  no  longer  seeking  to  minimize 
the  seriousness  of  the  Austrian-Serbian  quarrel,  ex- 
pressed the  pious  hope  that  the  "discussion"  would  at 
least  be  "localized."  Canadian  Pacifies  still  clattered 
downward.  Acerbities  between  Vienna  and  Belgrade 
were  growing  more  acrimonious  and  menacing  from 
hour  to  hour.  Diplomatic  correspondence  of  historic 
magnitude,  as  the  impending  avalanche  of  White 
Papers,  Blue  Books,  Yellow  Books  and  Red  Papers 
was  soon  to  show,  was  already  (July  20)  in  uninter- 
rupted progress,  though  the  quarreling  Irishmen  and 
militant  suffragettes  of  Great  Britain  knew  it  not,  any 
more  than  the  summer  resort  merrymakers  and  "cure- 
takers"  of  Germany.  The  foreign  offices,  stock  ex- 
changes, embassies,  legations  and  newspaper  offices  of 
the  Continent  were  fairly  alive  to  the  imminence  of 
transcendent  events,  but  the  great  European  public, 
though  within  ten  days  of  Armageddon,  was  magnifi- 
cently immersed  in  the  ignorance  which  the  poet  has 
so  truly  called  bliss. 

Her  "friendly  representations"  at  Belgrade  having 
proved  abortive,  Austria  now  prepared  for  more  force- 
ful measures.  On  July  21  Berlin  learned  that  Count 
Berchtold,  the  Viennese  foreign  minister,  had  pro- 
ceeded to  Ischl  to  submit  to  the  Emperor  Francis 
Joseph  the  note  he  had  drawn  up  for  presentation  to 
Serbia.  As  the  world  was  about  to  learn,  this  was  the 
fateful  ultimatum  which  poured  oil  on  the  European 
embers  and  set  them  aglare,  to  splutter,  burn  and  dev- 
astate in  a  long-enduring  and  all-engulfing  conflagra- 
tion. Simultaneously — though  this,  too,  was  not 
known  till  months  later — the  Austrian  minister  at  Bel- 


56  THE   ASSAULT 

grade  sent  off  a  dispatch  to  his  Government,  declaring 
that  a  "reckoning"  with  Serbia  could  not  be  "perma- 
nently avoided,"  that  "half  measures  were  useless," 
and  that  the  time  had  come  to  put  forward  "far- 
reaching  requirements  joined  to  effective  control." 
That,  as  events  were  soon  to  develop,  was  an  example 
of  the  diplomatic  rhetoric  which  masters  of  statecraft 
employ  for  concealment  of  thought.  It  meant  that 
nothing  less  than  the  abject  surrender  of  Serbian 
sovereignty  would  appease  Vienna's  desire  for  ven- 
geance for  Serajevo. 

During  all  these  hours,  so  pregnant  with  the  fate  of 
Europe,  the  German  Foreign  Office  was  stormed  by 
foreign  newspaper  correspondents  in  quest  of  light 
on  Germany's  attitude.  Was  she  counseling  modera- 
tion in  Vienna,  or  fishing  in  troubled  waters?  Was 
she  reminding  her  ally  that  while  Serajevo  was  pri- 
marily an  Austrian  question,  it  was  in  its  broad  aspects 
essentially  a  European  issue?  Was  the  Kaiser  really 
playing  his  vaunted  role  as  the  bulwark  of  European 
peace,  or  was  Herr  von  Tschirschky,  his  Amdassador 
in  Vienna,  adjuring  the  Ballplatz  that  it  was  Austria's 
duty  to  "stand  firm"  in  the  presence  of  the  crowning 
Slav  infamy,  and  that  William  of  Hohenzollern  was 
ready  once  again  to  don  "shining  armor"  for  the  de- 
fense of  "Germanic  honor"? 

These  are  the  questions  we  representatives  of  British 
and  American  newspapers  persistently  launched  at  the 
veracious  Berlin  Press  Bureau.  What  did  Hammann 
and  his  minions  tell  us?  That  Germany  regarded  the 
Austrian-Serbian  controversy  a  purely  private  affair 
between  those  two  countries ;  that  Germany  had  at  no 
stage  of  the  imbroglio  been  consulted  by  her  Austrian 


SLOW   MUSIC  57 

ally,  and  that  the  last  thing  in  the  world  which  oc- 
curred to  the  tactful  Wilhelmstrasse  was  to  proffer 
unasked-for  counsel  to  Count  Berchtold,  Emperor 
Francis  Joseph's  Foreign  Minister,  at  so  delicate  and 
critical  a  moment.  Vienna  would  properly  resent  such 
unwarranted  interference  with  her  sovereign  prerog- 
atives as  a  Great  Power — we  were  assured.  Ger- 
many's attitude  was  that  of  an  innocent  bystander  and 
interested  witness,  and  nothing  more.  That  was  the 
version  of  the  Fatherland's  attitude  sedulously  peddled 
out  for  both  home  and  foreign  consumption. 

Behind  us  lay  a  week  of  tremor  and  unrest  un- 
known since  the  days,  exactly  forty-four  years  pre- 
vious, preceding  the  Franco-Prussian  War.  The 
money  universe,  most  susceptible  and  prescient  of  all 
worlds,  rocked  with  nervous  alarm.  Its  instinctive  ap- 
prehension of  imminent  crisis  was  fanned  into  panic 
on  the  night  of  July  23,  when  word  came  that  Austria 
had  presented  Serbia  an  ultimatum  with  a  time  limit 
of  forty-eight  hours.  My  own  information  of  Vi- 
enna's crucial  step  was  prompt  and  unequivocal.  It 
was  on  its  way  to  London  and  New  York  before  seven 
o'clock  Thursday  evening,  Berlin  time.  I  was  grat- 
ified to  learn  at  the  Daily  Mail  office  in  London  three 
weeks  later  that  I  had  given  England  her  first  news 
of  the  match  which  had  at  last  been  applied  to  the 
European  powder  barrel.  It  was  five  or  six  hours 
later  before  general  announcement  of  the  Austrian 
ultimatum  arrived  in  Fleet  Street. 

I  was  not  surprised  to  learn  that  my  startling  tele- 
gram had  aroused  no  little  skepticism.  During  many 
days  preceding  it  was  the  despair  of  the  Berlin  corre- 
spondents of  British  newspapers  that  they  seemed  ut- 


58  THE  ASSAULT 

terly  unable  to  impress  their  home  publics  with  the 
fast-gathering  gravity  of  the  European  situation. 
London  was  no  less  nonchalant  than  Paris  and  St. 
Petersburg.  England  was  immersed  to  the  exclusion 
of  everything  else  in  the  throes  of  the  Irish-Ulster 
crisis.  Mr.  Redmond  and  Sir  Edward  Carson  loomed 
immeasurably  bigger  on  the  horizon  than  all  Austria 
and  Serbia  put  together.  In  the  boulevards,  cafes  and 
government-offices  of  Paris  the  salacious  details  of  the 
Caillaux  trial  absorbed  all  thought.  In  St.  Petersburg 
one  hundred  sixty  thousand  working  men  threat- 
ened an  upheaval  which  bore  an  uncomfortable  re- 
semblance to  the  revolutionary  conditions  of  1905. 
But  it  was  the  invincible  indifference  of  London,  as  it 
seemed  in  Berlin,  which  appealed  to  us  most. 

The  newspapers  of  July  21,  22  and  23  came  in  and 
indicated  that  for  England  Ulster  had  become  Europe. 
There  was  obviously  little  space  for,  and  less  interest 
in,  dispatches  from  Berlin  or  Vienna  describing  the 
"undisguised  concern"  prevalent  in  those  capitals.  On 
July  21  I  quoted  "high  diplomatic  authority"  for  the 
statement  that  the  pistol  would  be  at  Serbia's  breast 
before  the  end  of  the  week.  But  London  remained 
impervious.  More  than  one  of  my  British  colleagues, 
equally  unsuccessful  in  stirring  the  emotions  of  his 
people,  threw  up  his  hands  in  resignation,  muttering 
things  about  "British  complacency,"  which  would  have 
come  with  poor  grace  from  a  mere  American. 

Since  then  it  has  occurred  to  me  that  England's 
sublime  unconcern  in  the  approach  of  Armageddon 
may  have  been  more  apparent  than  real.  Sir  Edward 
Grey's  strenuous  days  and  nights  of  telegraphing  to 


SLOW   MUSIC  59 

his  Continental  ambassadors,  as  England's  White  Pa- 
per revealed,  had  set  in  as  early  as  July  20,  when  he 
wired  Sir  Edward  Goschen  to  Berlin  that  "I  asked 
the  German  Ambassador  today  if  he  had  any  news 
of  what  was  going  on  in  Vienna  with  regard  to  Ser- 
bia." That  was  No.  1  in  the  series  of  historic  dis- 
patches comprising  the  official  British  record  of  the 
genesis  of  the  war,  which  shows  that  there  was  no  lack 
of  anticipation  of  coming  events,  as  far  as  Downing 
Street  was  concerned.  So  I  am  impelled  to  think  that 
there  may  have  been  method  in  Fleet  Street's  "splash- 
ing" (Anglice  for  "featuring")  pretty  Miss  Gabrielle 
Ray's  entangled  love  affairs  and  minimizing  the  de- 
termination of  Austria  to  plunge  Europe  into  war. 
There  is  a  fine  spirit  of  solidarity  in  England  concern- 
ing foreign  affairs.  British  editors  in  particular  tra- 
ditionally refrain  from  crossing  the  policy  of  the  For- 
eign Office,  no  matter  what  the  party  complexion  of 
the  minister  in  charge.  They  are  accustomed  to  sup- 
porting it  unequivocally  either  by  omission  or  commis- 
sion, as  the  interests  of  Great  Britain  from  hour  to 
hour  suggest.  Whenever  an  attitude  of  debonair  de- 
tachment toward  a  given  "foreign  affair"  is  best  de- 
signed to  promote  the  country's  diplomatic  programme, 
Fleet  Street  can  be  insensibility  incarnate,  national 
esprit  de  corps  effectually  fulfilling  the  function  of  a 
censor.  No  one  has  ever  told  me  that  that  is  why  the 
appointment  of  a  new  principal  for  Dulwich  College 
received  almost  as  much  prominence  on  the  morning 
of  July  24  as  news  from  Berlin,  Vienna  or  Belgrade. 
My  suggestion  of  the  reason  is  a  diffident  surmise, 
pure  and  simple.    It  contributed  materially,  no  doubt, 


60  THE   ASSAULT 

toward  making  Germany  believe  that  England  was  too 
"preoccupied"  with  Irishmen  and  suffragettes  to  think 
of  going  to  war  for  her  political  honor. 

But  in  Berlin  things  were  now  (July  24)  moving  to- 
ward the  climax  with  impetuous  momentum.  On  that 
day,  summing  up  events  and  opinion  in  official  and 
military  quarters,  I  telegraphed  the  following  message 
to  London : 

"  'We  are  ready !'  This  was  the  sententious  reply 
given  today  by  a  high  official  of  the  General  Staff  to 
an  inquiry  with  regard  to  Germany's  state  of  pre- 
paredness in  the  event  that  an  Austro-Serbian  conflict 
precipitates  a  European  war. 

"I  am  able  to  state  authoritatively  that  the  casus 
foederis  which  binds  Austria,  Germany  and  Italy  in 
alliance  would  come  into  effect  automatically  the  in- 
stant Austria  is  attacked  from  any  quarter  other  than 
Servia.* 

"I  am  further  able  to  say  that  while  Germany  ex- 
pects that  war  between  Austria  and  Serbia  is  possible, 
owing  to  the  admittedly  unprecedented  severity  of  the 
Austrian  demands,  this  Government  confidently  hopes 
that  hostilities  will  be  confined  to  them. 

"It  would  be  going  too  far  to  say  that  'war  fever' 


*  The  "assurances"  given  me  by  Foreign  Office  spokesmen,  as 
reproduced  in  the  foregoing  telegram,  were,  of  course,  made  at  a 
moment  when  the  German  Government,  no  doubt  quite  sincerely, 
felt  surer  than  it  did  ten  days  hence  that  the  casus  fccderis  which 
obligated  Italy  to  join  Germany  and  Austria  in  war  would  be 
recognized  by  her  without  quibble.  Germany,  as  the  world  was 
so  soon  to  find  out,  had  convinced  her  own  people  that  her  war 
was  a  holy  war  of  defense,  but  Italy,  visiting  upon  her  Triple 
Alliance  partners  the  supreme  condemnation  of  contemporary 
political  history,  deserted  them  on  the  palpable  ground  that  their 
war  was  war  of  aggression,  pure  and  unalloyed. 


SLOW   MUSIC  61 

prevails  in  Berlin  to  the  extent  it  is  reported  to  be 
rampant  in  Vienna.  I  find,  however,  even  in  circles 
to  which  the  thought  of  war  is  ordinarily  repugnant, 
that  the  imminent  possibility  of  a  European  conflict 
is  contemplated  with  equanimity.  They  say  that  Aus- 
tria's resolute  action  has  already  cleared  the  atmos- 
phere of  long-prevailing  'uncertainty'  which  was  grad- 
ually becoming  insufferable.  They  declare  in  accents 
of  relief  that  a  situation  has  finally  been  reached  where 
there  can  be  no  retreat.  Far  worse  things,  it  is  de- 
clared, are  conceivable  than  the  conflagration  which 
Europe  for  years  has  half  dreaded  and  half  pre- 
pared for. 

"Official  Germany,  nevertheless,  does  not  believe 
that  Russia  will  force  the  issue.  It  is  argued  that  the 
matter  at  stake  is  entirely  a  domestic  quarrel  between 
Austria  and  Serbia  and  involves  Pan-Slavism  only  in- 
directly. If  Russia  makes  the  controversy  a  pretext 
for  assisting  the  Serbians,  it  is  pointed  out  that  'the 
world's  strongest  bulwark  of  the  monarchial  principle 
would  practically  place  the  stamp  of  approval  on  regi- 
cide.' As  suppression  of  regicide  propaganda,  root 
and  branch,  is  the  mainspring  of  the  Austrian  action, 
the  German  Government  holds  it  is  inconceivable  that 
Russia  could  in  such  circumstances  align  herself  with 
Serbia.  If  she  does,  and  I  am  permitted  to  underline 
this  phase  of  the  crisis  with  all  possible  emphasis,  the 
full  strength  of  Germany's  and  Italy's  armed  forces 
are  ready  to  be  mercilessly  hurled  against  her,  and 
will  be. 

"A  war  against  Russia  would  never  be  more  popular 
in  Germany  than  at  the  present  moment.  For  months 
past  the  country  has  been  educated  by  its  most  dis- 


62  THE   ASSAULT 

tinguished  leaders  to  believe  that  an  attack  from 
Russia  is  imminent.  During  the  past  week  Professor 
Hans  Delbriick  has  been  giving  wide  publicity  to  an 
'open  letter'  received  from  a  Russian  colleague,  Pro- 
fessor Mitrosanoff,  containing  the  following  passage : 

"  'It  must  not  be  forgotten  that  Russian  public 
opinion  plays  a  vastly  different  role  than  it  did  a  decade 
ago.  It  has  now  grown  into  a  full  political  force. 
Animosity  toward  Germans  is  in  everybody's  heart 
and  mouth.  Seldom  was  public  opinion  more  unani- 
mous.' 

"Almost  simultaneously  Professor  Schiemann,  the 
Kaiser's  confidential  adviser  on  world  politics,  has 
heaped  fresh  fuel  on  the  anti-Russian  fire  by  declaring : 
'We  have  reason  to  think  that  the  underlying  purpose 
of  President  Poincare's  visit  to  the  Czar  was  to  expand 
the  Triple  Entente  into  a  Quadruple  Alliance  by  the 
inclusion  of  Rumania  against  Germany.' 

"The  Bourse  closed  amid  undisguised  alarm  and 
the  wildest  fears  for  what  the  week-end  may  bring 
forth.  The  public  is  inclined  to  remain  reassured  as 
long  as  the  Kaiser  consents  to  remain  afloat  in  the 
Hohenzollem  in  the  fjords  of  Norway,  but  he  can 
reach  German  waters  in  twenty-four  hours  aboard  the 
speedy  dispatch-boat  Sleipner,  which  is  attached  to 
the  Imperial  squadron. 

"I  asked  a  military  man  today  what  show  of  force 
Germany  would  make  at  the  outbreak  of  hostilities  in- 
volving her.  He  said :  'She  could  easily  mobilize  one 
million  five  hundred  thousand  men  within  forty-eight 
hours  on  each  of  her  frontiers,  east  and  west.  That 
gigantic  total  of  three  million  would  represent  only 
the  active  war  establishment  and  reserves.' " 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  CLIMAX 

MY  LONG-STANDING  preconceptions  of  Ber- 
lin as  the  phlegmatic  capital  of  a  phlegmatic 
people  were  obliterated  for  all  time  at  eight-thirty 
o'clock  on  Saturday  evening,  July  25,  1914.  Along  with 
them  went  equally  well-founded  beliefs  that,  however 
incorrigible  their  War  Party's  lust  for  international 
strife,  the  German  masses  were  pacific  by  tempera- 
ment and  conviction.  When  the  news  of  Serbia's  al- 
leged rejection  of  Austria's  ultimatum  was  hoisted  in 
Unter  den  Linden,  and  Berlin  gave  way  in  a  flash  to 
a  babel  and  pandemonium  of  sheer  war  fever  probably 
never  equaled  in  a  civilized  community,  I  knew  that 
all  my  "psychology"  of  the  Germans  was  as  myopic 
as  if  I  had  learned  it  in  Professor  Miinsterberg's  lab- 
oratory at  Harvard.  Instantaneously  I  realized  that 
the  stage  managers  had  done  their  work  with  deadly 
precision  and  all-devouring  thoroughness.  If  the  mere 
suggestion  of  gunpowder  could  distend  the  nostrils  of 
the  "peaceful  Germans"  and  cause  their  capital  to  vi- 
brate in  every  fiber  of  its  being  as  that  first  real  hint 
of  war  did,  I  was  forced  to  conclude  that  the  cataclysm 
now  impending  would  find  a  Germany  animated  to 
its  innermost  depths  by  primeval  fighting  passions. 
Events  have  not  belied  the  new  and  disquieting  im- 
pressions with  which  Berlin's  war  delirium  in- 
spired me. 

63 


64  THE   ASSAULT 

On  the  evening  of  July  25,  after  cabling  to  Eng- 
land and  the  United  States  accounts  of  the  blackest 
Saturday  in  Berlin  bourse  history,  I  made  my  way  to 
U titer  den  Linden  in  anticipation  of  demonstrations 
certain  to  be  provoked  by  the  result  of  the  Austrian 
ultimatum,  no  matter  whether  Serbia  had  yielded  or 
defied.  I  reached  the  Wilhelmstrasse  corner,  where 
the  British  Embassy  stood,  only  a  moment  after  the 
fateful  bulletin  had  been  put  up  in  the  Lokal-Anzeiger's 
windows.  It  read :  "Serbia  Rejects  the  Austrian  Ulti- 
matum !"  That  was  not  quite  true — to  put  it  mildly — 
as  the  world  was  soon  to  know  that  far  from  "reject- 
ing" Count  Berchtold's  cavalier  demands,  Serbia 
bent  the  knee  to  every  single  one  of  them  except  that 
which  called  for  abject  surrender  of  her  sovereign  in- 
dependence. But  the  huge  crowds  which  had  been 
gathered  in  Unter  den  Linden  since  sundown — it  was 
now  a  little  past  eight-thirty  o'clock  and  still  quite  light 
— knew  nothing  of  this.  All  they  knew  and  all  they 
cared  about  was  that  "Serbien  hat  abgelehnt!"  War, 
the  intuition  of  the  mob  assured  it,  was  now  inevita- 
ble. 

"Krieg!  Krieg!"  (War!  War!)  it  thundered. 
"Nieder  mit  Serbien!  Hoch,  Oesterreich!"  (Down 
with  Serbia!  Hurrah  for  Austria!)  rang  from  thou- 
sands of  frenzied  throats.  Processions  formed. 
Men  and  youths,  here  and  there  women  and  girls, 
lined  up,  military  fashion,  four  abreast.  One  caval- 
cade, the  larger,  headed  toward  Pariser  Platz  and  the 
Brandenburg  Gate.  Another  eastward,  down  the  Lin- 
den. A  mighty  song  now  rent  the  air — Gott  erhalte 
Franz  den  Kaiser  (God  Save  Emperor  Francis),  the 
Austrian  national  anthem.    Then  shouts>  yelled  in  the 


THE    CLIMAX  65 

accents  of  imprecation  —  "Nieder  mit  Russland!" 
(Down  with  Russia).  The  bigger  procession's  des- 
tination was  soon  known.  It  was  marching  to  the  Aus- 
trian Embassy  in  the  Moltke-strasse.  The  smaller  pa- 
rade was  headed  for  the  Russian  Embassy  in  Unter 
den  Linden.  In  my  taxi  I  decided  to  follow  on  to 
Moltke-strasse,  and,  crossing  to  the  far  side  of  the 
Linden,  I  came  up  with  the  rearguard  of  the  demon- 
strators just  opposite  the  chateau-like  Embassy  of 
France  in  the  Pariser  Platz.  Gathered  on  the  portico 
servants  were  clustered  watching  the  "manifestation." 
At  their  hapless  heads  the  processionists  were  shaking 
their  German  fists  as  much  as  to  say  that  France,  too, 
was  included  in  the  orgy  of  patriotic  wrath  now  surg- 
ing up  in  the  Teutonic  soul.  It  was  a  touch  of  humor 
in  an  otherwise  overwhelmingly  grim  spectacle. 

Through  the  entrance  to  the  leafy  Tiergarten,  down 
the  pompous  and  sepulchral  Avenue  of  Victory, 
across  the  Konigs-Platz  with  its  Gulliverian  statue  of 
the  Iron  Chancellor  and  the  Column  of  Victory, 
through  the  district  whose  street  nomenclature 
breathes  of  Germany's  martial  glory — Roon-strasse, 
Bismarck-strasse  and  Moltke-strasse — the  parade,  now 
swelled  to  many  times  its  original  proportions,  halted 
in  front  of  the  Austrian  Embassy.  Some  self-ap- 
pointed cheer-leader  called  for  Hochs  for  the  ally, 
for  another  stanza  of  the  Austrian  national  anthem, 
for  more  "Down  with  Serbia,"  and  for  more  yells  of 
defiance  to  Russia.  Opposite  the  embassy-palace  tow- 
ered the  massive  block-square  General  Staff  building. 
From  it  there  emerged,  while  the  demonstration  was 
at  its  zenith,  three  young  subalterns.  The  mob 
seized  them  joyously,  shouldered  them  and  acclaimed 


66  THE   ASSAULT 

them — the  brass-buttoned  and  epauletted  embodiment 
of  the  army  on  whom  Germany's  hopes  were  pres- 
ently to  be  pinned.  "Krieg!  Krieg!"  the  war  mongers 
chanted  in  ecstatic  shrieks.  Then  "Deutschland, 
Deutschland  uber  Alles,"  twin  of  the  Austrian  anthem 
as  far  as  the  melody  is  concerned,  was  sung  with  tre- 
mendous fervor.  The  crowd  yelled  for  Emperor 
Francis  Joseph's  ambassador,  the  Hungarian  Count 
von  Szogeny-Marich,  but,  if  he  was  at  home,  he  pre- 
ferred not  to  face  the  multitude.  Presently  a  beard- 
less young  embassy  attache  appeared  at  an  open  win- 
dow— the  physical  personification  of  the  allied  Empire 
— and  he  almost  reeled  from  the  shock  of  the  tumul- 
tuous shout  hurtled  in  his  monocled  countenance. 

For  nearly  an  hour  delirium  reigned  unbridled.  Then 
the  demonstrators  betook  themselves  back  to  the  Lin- 
den district,  where  they  met  up  with  more  processions. 
Throughout  the  night,  far  into  Sunday  morning,  Ber- 
lin reverberated  with  their  tramp  and  clamor.  My 
doubts  as  to  the  capital's  temper  toward  war  were  re- 
solved, my  cherished  confidence  in  the  average  Ger- 
man's fundamental  love  of  peace  shattered.  Berlin 
is  the  tuning-fork  of  the  Empire.  As  she  was  shriek- 
ing "War!  War!"  so,  I  felt  sure,  Hamburg  and 
Munich,  Dresden  and  Stuttgart,  Cologne  and  Breslau, 
Konigsberg  and  Metz,  would  be  shrieking  before  the 
world  was  many  hours  older.  And  when  the  Sunday 
papers  reported  that  "fervent  patriotic  demonstrations" 
had  broken  out  everywhere  the  night  before,  as  soon  as 
"Serbia's  insolent  action"  was  communicated  to  the 
public,  something  within  me  said  that  only  a  miracle 
could  now  restrain  war-mad  Germany  from  herself 
plunging  into  the  fray. 


THE   CLIMAX  67 

I  have  said  that  Armageddon  was  instigated  by  the 
German  War  Party.  In  substantiation  of  that  charge 
let  me  narrate  a  bit  of  unrecorded  history.  About 
four  o'clock  of  the  afternoon  of  July  25 — the  day  of 
orgy  in  Berlin  above  described — the  Austrian  For- 
eign Office  in  Vienna  issued  a  confidential  intimation 
to  various  persons  accustomed  to  be  favored  with 
such  communications  that  the  Serbian  reply  to  the 
ultimatum  had  arrived  and  was  satisfactory.  It  did 
not  succumb  in  respect  of  every  demand  put  forth  by 
Austria,  but  it  was  sufficiently  groveling  to  insure 
peace.  Foreign  newspaper  correspondents,  to  several 
of  whom  the  information  was  supplied,  learned,  when 
they  applied  at  their  own  Embassies  for  confirmation, 
that  the  latter,  too,  had  been  formally  acquainted  with 
the  fact  that  Serbia's  concessions  were  far-reaching 
enough  to  guarantee  a  bloodless  settlement  of  the  ugly 
crisis. 

Vienna  breathed  a  long,  sincere  sigh  of  relief.  She 
had  feared  the  worst  from  the  moment  Count  Berch- 
told  dispatched  the  Berlin-dictated  ultimatum  to  Bel- 
grade ;  but  the  worst  was  over  now.  Serbian  penitence 
had  saved  Austrian  face. 

While  correspondents  were  busily  preparing  their 
telegrams,  which  were  to  flash  all  over  the  world  the 
welcome  tidings  that  war  had  been  averted,  though 
only  by  a  hair's  breadth,  the  Austrian  Foreign  Office 
was  telephoning  to  the  Foreign  Office  in  Berlin  the 
text  of  Serbia's  reply. 

A  certain  journalist  was  on  his  way  to  the  telegraph 
office  to  "file"  his  "story."  The  editor  of  a  great 
Vienna  newspaper,  a  friend,  intercepted  him. 

"Well,  what  are  you  saying?"  the  editor  inquired. 


68  THE   ASSAULT 

"That  it's  peace,  after  all,"  replied  the  correspond- 
ent. 

"It  was  peace,"  said  the  editor  sadly,  "but  meantime 
Berlin  has  spoken." 

The  week  of  fate  opened  on  Monday,  July  27,  amid 
general  expectations  that  the  worst  had  become  inevita- 
ble. Popular  alarm  was  not  assuaged  by  the  impulsive 
action  of  the  Kaiser,  contrary  to  the  preferences  of  the 
Government,  in  breaking  off  his  Norwegian  cruise 
when  Serbia's  defiance  was  wirelessed  to  the  Hohen- 
zollern  and  rushing  back  to  Kiel  under  full  steam. 
"The  Foreign  Office  regrets  this  step,"  reported  Sir 
Horace  Rumbold,  acting  British  Ambassador  at  Ber- 
lin, to  Sir  Edwin  Grey.  "It  was  taken  on  His  Majes- 
ty's own  initiative  and  the  Foreign  Office  fears  that 
the  Emperor's  sudden  return  may  cause  speculation 
and  excitement."  It  was,  of  course,  characteristic  of 
the  monarch  whom  Paul  Singer,  the  late  Socialist 
chieftain,  once  described  to  me  as  "William  the  Sud- 
den." "Speculation  and  excitement"  are  precisely 
what  the  Kaiser's  dramatic  return  did  precipitate.  He 
did  not  come  into  Berlin,  but  retired  to  the  compara- 
tive privacy  of  the  New  Palace  in  Potsdam,  to  engage 
forthwith  in  protracted  council  with  his  political,  dip- 
lomatic, military  and  naval  advisers.  Meantime  Ber- 
lin throbbed  with  forebodings  and  unrest.  The  Stock 
Exchange  almost  collapsed.  Values  tumbled  by  the 
millions  of  marks.  Fortunes  vanished  between  break- 
fast and  lunch.  Financiers  suicided.  Savings  banks 
were  besieged  by  battalions  of  nervous  depositors. 
Gold  began  to  disappear  from  circulation. 

At  the  Foreign  Office,  newspaper  correspondents 


THE   CLIMAX  69 

were  informed  that  the  situation  was  undoubtedly  ag- 
gravated, but  not  "hopeless."  Germany's  aim  was  to 
"localize"  the  Austrian-Serbian  war,  which  was  now 
an  actuality.  "All  depends  on  Russia,"  Herr  Ham- 
mann's  automatons  assured  us  when  we  asked  who 
held  the  key  to  the  situation.  Germany  remained,  as 
she  had  been  from  the  beginning  of  the  crisis,  merely 
"an  interested  bystander."  Austria  had  not  sought 
her  counsel,  and  "none  had  been  offered."  It  would 
have  been  an  insufferable  offense  (said  the  Hammann- 
ites)  for  Berlin  to  intrude  upon  Vienna  with  "advice" 
at  such  an  hour.  Austria  was  a  great  sovereign  Power, 
Count  Berchtold  a  diplomat  of  sagacity  and  courage, 
and  Germany's  role  was  obviously  that  of  a  silent 
friend.  She  had  very  particularly  "not  been  con- 
cerned" with  the  admittedly  stiff  terms  the  rejection 
of  which  had  now,  unhappily,  resulted  in  war.  All 
this  we  were  told  at  Wilhelmstrasse  76  in  accents  of 
touching  sincerity. 

The  attitude  of  the  German  public  was  now  one  of 
amazing  resignation  to  the  possibility  of  war.  Men  of 
affairs,  who  had  during  the  preceding  forty-eight  hours 
in  many  cases  seen  great  fortunes  irresistibly  slipping 
from  their  grasp,  contemplated  a  European  conflagra- 
tion with  incredible  equanimity.  I  recall  with  espe- 
cial distinctness  the  views  expressed  by  my  old  friend, 
Geheimrat  L.,  the  head  of  an  important  provincial 
bank.  "We  have  not  sought  war,"  he  said,  "but  we 
are  ready  for  it — far  readier  than  any  of  our  possible 
antagonists.  Our  preparedness,  military,  naval,  finan- 
cial and  economic,  is  in  the  most  complete  state  it  has 
ever  attained.  Confidence  in  the  army  and  navy  is 
unbounded,  and  it  is  justified.    For  years  the  political 


70  THE   ASSAULT 

atmosphere  has  been  growing  more  and  more  uncom- 
fortable for  Germany  (Geheimrat  L.  evidently  longed 
for  "a  place  in  the  sun,"  too),  and  we  have  felt  that 
war  was  inevitable,  sooner  or  later.  It  is  better  that 
it  comes  now,  when  our  strength  is  at  the  zenith,  than 
later  when  our  enemies  have  had  time  to  discount  our 
superiority."  Geheimrat  L.  and  I  were  standing  in 
Unter  den  Linden  while  he  talked.  Another  proces- 
sion of  war-zealots  tramped  by,  singing  Deutschland, 
Deutschland  iiber  Alles.  "You  see,"  he  said,  pointing 
to  the  demonstrators  and  waving  his  own  hat  as  the 
crowd  shrieked  "Hoch  der  Kaiser!",  "we  all  feel  the 
same  way."  Germany,  in  other  words,  while  not  ex- 
actly spoiling  for  war,  was  something  more  than  ready 
for  it  and  would  leap  into  the  ring,  stripped  for  the 
combat,  almost  before  the  gong  had  called  time.  Events 
did  not  belie  that  fantasy,  either. 

Sir  Edward  Grey  was  now  making  eleventh-hour 
efforts  to  stave  off  fate.  He  was  constrained  to  have 
Vienna  view  the  Serbian  imbroglio  from  the  broad 
standpoint  of  a  European  question,  which  the  Ger- 
manic Powers,  of  course,  knew  that  it  was.  He  pro- 
posed a  conference  in  London  between  himself  and  the 
ambassadors  of  Germany,  Russia,  France  and  Italy,  in 
the  hope  of  settling  the  Austrian-Serbian  dispute  on  the 
basis  of  Serbia's  reply  to  Count  Berchtold's  ultimatum. 
"It  has  become  only  too  apparent,"  the  British  Foreign 
Secretary  wrote  a  year  later  in  a  crushing  rejoinder 
to  the  German  Chancellor's  revamped  and  distorted 
version  of  the  war's  beginnings,  "that  in  the  proposal 
we  made,  which  Russia,  France  and  Italy  agreed  to, 
and  which  Germany  vetoed,  lay  the  only  hope  of  peace. 
And  it  was  such  a  good  hope!    Serbia  had  accepted 


THE   CLIMAX  71 

nearly  all  of  the  Austrian  ultimatum,  severe  and  vio- 
lent as  it  was."  Herr  Hammann's  minions  told  us 
with  pleasing  plausibility  of  the  reasons  why  Germany 
declined  the  conference  proposal.  "We  can  not  rec- 
ommend Austria,"  they  said,  "to  submit  questions  af- 
fecting her  national  honor  to  a  tribunal  of  outsiders. 
It  would  not  be  consistent  with  our  obligations  as  an 
ally."  That  was  subterfuge  unalloyed,  as  was  amply 
proved  by  Germany's  subsequent  refusal  even  to  sug- 
gest any  other  method  of  mediation,  in  which  Sir  Ed- 
ward Grey  had  promised  acquiescence  in  advance. 
The  War  Party's  plans  were  plainly  too  far  progressed 
to  tolerate  so  tame  and  inglorious  a  retreat.  It  was 
thirsting  for  blood,  and  was  in  no  humor  to  content 
itself  with  milk  and  water.  It  was  like  asking  a  cham- 
pion runner,  trained  to  the  second  and  poised  on  the 
starting  tape  in  an  attitude  of  trembling  expectation 
of  the  "Go"  pistol,  to  rise,  return  to  the  dressing-room, 
get  into  street  clothes  and  cool  his  ardor  for  victory 
and  laurels  by  taking  a  leisurely  walk  around  the  block. 
The  Tirpitzes,  the  Falkehhayns,  the  Reventlows, 
the  Bernhardis  and  the  Crown  Princes,  lurking  Me- 
phistopheles-like  in  the  background,  leaned  over  Beth- 
mann  Hollweg  and  the  Kaiser  on  July  28,  while  Sir 
Edward  Grey's  proposal  was  undergoing  final  consid- 
eration, and  whispered  in  their  ear  an  imperious  "No !" 
Germany,  as  "evidence  of  good  faith,"  the  Wilhelm- 
strasse  told  us  next  day,  was  continuing  to  exercise 
friendly  pressure  "in  the  direction  of  peace"  at  both 
St.  Petersburg  and  Vienna.  But,  as  the  Colonel  said 
of  Mr.  Taft,  Berlin  meant  well  feebly.  The  mills  of 
the  war  gods  were  grinding  remorselessly,  and  they 
were  not  to  be  clogged. 


72  THE   ASSAULT, 

Early  in  the  evening  of  Wednesday,  July  29,  the 
Kaiser  summoned  a  council  of  war  at  Potsdam.  The 
council  lasted  far  into  the  night.  Dawn  of  Thursday 
was  approaching  before  it  ended.  All  the  great  pal- 
adins of  State,  civilian,  military  and  naval,  were  pres- 
ent. Prince  Henry  of  Prussia,  freshly  arrived  from 
London,  brought  the  latest  tidings  of  sentiment  pre- 
vailing in  England.  The  Imperial  Chancellor  and 
Foreign  Secretary  von  Jagow  were  armed  with  up- 
to-the-minute  news  of  the  diplomatic  situation  in  Paris 
and  St.  Petersburg.  Russia's  plans  and  movements 
were  the  all-dominating  issue.  General  von  Falken- 
hayn,  Minister  of  War,  was  prepared  with  confidential 
information  that,  despite  the  Czar's  ostensible  desire 
for  peace  and  his  still  pending  communication  with 
the  Kaiser  to  that  end,  "military  measures  and  dispo- 
sitions" of  unmistakably  menacing  character  were 
in  progress  on  both  the  German  and  Austrian  fron- 
tiers. Lieutenant-General  von  Moltke,  Chief  of  the 
General  Staff,  was  supplied  not  only  with  corrobo- 
rative information  of  the  imminency  of  "danger"  from 
Russia,  but  with  reassuring  details  of  Germany's 
power  to  meet  and  check  it.  Grand-Admiral  von 
Tirpitz,  Secretary  of  the  Navy,  and  Admiral  von  Pohl, 
Chief  of  the  Admiralty  Staff,  were  ready  to  convince 
the  Supreme  War  Lord  that  the  fleet  was  no  less  pre- 
pared than  the  army  for  any  and  all  emergencies. 
There  was  absolutely  nothing,  from  a  military  and 
naval  standpoint,  so  the  generals  and  admirals  were 
eager  to  demonstrate,  to  justify  Germany  in  assuming 
and  maintaining  anything  but  "a  strong  position." 

Some  day,  perhaps,  the  history  of  that  fateful  night 
at  Potsdam  will  be  written,  for  there  was  Armageddon 


THE   CLIMAX  73 

born.  Its  full  details  have  never  leaked  out.  So  much 
I  believe  can  be  here  set  down  with  certainty — it  was 
not  quite  a  harmonious  council  which  finally  plumped 
for  war.  At  the  outset,  at  any  rate,  it  was  divided 
into  camps  which  found  themselves  in  diametrical  op- 
position. The  "peace  party,"  or  what  was  left  of  it, 
is  said,  loath  as  the  world  is  to  believe  it,  to  have  been 
headed  by  the  Kaiser  himself.  Bethmann  Holl- 
weg  supported  his  Imperial  Master's  view  that  war 
should  only  be  resorted  to  as  a  last  desperate  emer- 
gency. Von  Jagow,  the  innocuous  Foreign  Secretary, 
dancing  as  usual  to  his  superiors'  whistle,  "sided" 
with  the  Emperor  and  the  Chancellor.  Von  Falken- 
hayn  and  von  Tirpitz  demanded  war.  Germany  was 
ready;  her  adversaries  were  not;  the  issue  was  plain. 
Von  Moltke  was  non-committal.  He  is  a  Christian 
Scientist,  and  otherwise  pacific  by  temperament. 
Prince  Henry  of  Prussia  did  not  at  least  violently 
insist  upon  peace.  I  could  never  verify  whether  the 
German  Crown  Prince  was  permitted  to  participate  in 
the  war  council  or  not.  If  he  was,  posterity  may  be 
sure  that  his  influence  was  not  exercised  unduly  in 
the  direction  of  a  bloodless  solution  of  the  crisis.  Herr 
Kuhn,  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  submitted  satis- 
fying figures  to  prove  that,  if  war  must  be,  Germany 
was  financially  caparisoned.  From  Herr  Ballin  came 
word  that  if  war  should  unhappily  be  forced  upon  the 
Fatherland  by  the  bear,  the  present  positions  of  Ger- 
man liners  were  such  that  few,  if  any,  of  them  would 
fall  certain  prey  to  enemy  cruisers.  Those  which 
could  not  reach  home  ports  would  be  able  to  take 
refuge  in  snug  neutral  harbors. 

The  next  day,  Thursday,  July  30,  I  was  able  to 


74  THE   ASSAULT 

telegraph  my  chiefs  in  London  and  New  York  that  the 
fat  was  now  almost  irrevocably  in  the  fire.  The  War 
Party's  views  had  prevailed.  The  fiction  that  "Rus- 
sian mobilization"  was  an  intolerable  peril  which  Ger- 
many could  no  longer  face  in  inactivity  had  been  so 
assiduously  maintained  that  any  reluctance  to  go  to 
war,  which  may  have  lingered  in  the  Kaiser's  soul, 
was  now  overcome.  The  sword  had  literally  been 
"forced"  into  his  hand.  Russia,  it  was  decided,  was 
to  be  notified  that  demobilization  or  German  "counter- 
mobilization"  within  twenty-four  hours  was  the  choice 
she  had  to  make.  My  information  went  considerably 
beyond  this  so-called  "last  German  effort  on  behalf  of 
peace."  It  was  to  the  effect  that  while  Germany  had 
taken  "one  more  final  step"  in  the  direction  of  an 
amicable  solution  of  the  crisis,  she  did  not  really  ex- 
pect it  to  be  successful,  and  had,  indeed,  resorted  to  it 
merely  in  order  to  be  able  to  say  that  she  had  "left  no 
stone  unturned  to  prevent  war." 

Germany  was  now  in  everything  except  a  formally 
proclaimed  state  of  war.  Mobilization  was  not  ac- 
tually "ordered,"  but  all  the  multitudinous  prelimi- 
naries for  it  were  well  under  way.  As  later  developed, 
German  reservists  from  far-off  Southwest  Africa  were 
at  that  very  moment  en  route  to  Europe  on  suddenly 
granted  "leaves  of  absence."  The  terrible  button  at 
whose  signal  the  German  war  machine  would  move  was 
all  but  pressed.  To  prove  it  the  super-patriotic,  Gov- 
ernment-controlled Lokal-Anzeiger  let  a  woefully  tell- 
tale cat  out  of  the  bag.  It  issued  a  lurid  "Extra"  at 
two-thirty  p.  mv  categorically  announcing  that  "the  en- 
tire German  army  and  navy  had  been  ordered  to 
mobilize."  After  the  news  had  spread  through  Berlin 


THE   CLIMAX  75 

like  wildfire  and  sent  prices  on  the  Bourse  tobogganing 
toward  the  bottom  at  the  dizziest  pace  of  all  the  week, 
the  Lokal-Anzeiger  twenty  minutes  later  blandly  issued 
another  "Extra,"  explaining  that  through  "a  gross 
misdemeanor  in  its  circulating  department"  the  public 
had  been  furnished  with  "inaccurate  news"  about 
mobilization ! 

The  good  "Lokal's"  news  was  not  "inaccurate."  It 
was  only  premature,  for  twenty- four  hours  later,  on 
Friday,  July  31,  it  was  permitted,  along  with 
other  papers,  to  flood  the  metropolis  with  another 
"Extra,"  officially  proclaiming  that  Emperor  William 
had  declared  Germany  to  be  in  a  "state  of  war."  The 
"Extras"  added  that  the  Kaiser  would  himself  shortly 
arrive  in  Berlin  from  Potsdam.  No  one  doubted  now 
that  the  Fatherland  was  on  the  brink  of  grim  and 
portentous  events.  War  might  only  be  a  matter  of 
hours,  perhaps  minutes.  Instantaneously  all  roads  led 
to  Unter  den  Linden.  Through  it,  now  Oberster 
Kriegsherr  indeed — Supreme  War  Lord  is  not  an 
ironical  sobriquet  foisted  upon  the  German  Emperor 
by  detractors,  as  many  people  think,  but  an  actual, 
formal  title — the  Kaiser  would  soon  be  passing.  His- 
tory was  to  be  made  to  repeat  itself.  Old  King  Will- 
iam I,  returning  to  Berlin  from  Ems  on  the  eve  of 
the  Franco-Prussian  War  made  a  spectacular  en- 
trance into  Berlin  under  identical  circumstances.  The 
welcome  to  his  grandson  must  be  no  less  imposing  and 
immortal. 

I  was  fortunate  enough  to  secure  a  reserved  seat 
in  the  grandstand — a  table  on  the  balcony  of  the  Cafe 
Kranzler  at  the  intersection  of  Friedrichstrasse  and 
the  Linden.    The  boulevard  was  jammed.    All  Berlin 


76  THE   ASSAULT 

seemed  gathered  in  it.  Presently  the  triple-toned  mo- 
tor horn  of  the  Imperial  automobile  tooted  from  afar 
the  signal  that  the  Kaiser  was  approaching.  A  tor- 
nado of  cheers  and  Hocks  greeted  him  all  along  the 
Via  Triumphalis.  The  Empress,  at  his  side,  smiled 
in  token  of  the  most  spontaneous  welcome  the  Kaiser 
ever  received  at  the  hands  of  his  never  overfond  Ber- 
liners.  The  brass-helmeted  War  Lord  himself  was 
the  personification  of  gravity.  His  favorite  pose  in 
public  is  uncompromising  sternness;  to-day  it  was  the 
last  word  in  severity.  He  did  not  seem  a  happy  man, 
nor  even  so  haughty  as  I  always  imagined  he  would  be 
in  the  midst  of  war  delirium.  It  was  an  unmistakably 
anxious  Kaiser  who  entered  his  capital  on  that  after- 
noon of  deathless  memory. 

The  Imperial  show,  smacking  strongly  of  William's 
own  stage  management,  had  only  begun,  for  now  the 
Crown  Prince's  familiar  motor  signal,  Ta-tee,  Ta-ta, 
sounded  from  the  direction  of  Brandenburg  Gate,  and 
presently  he  came  along,  with  the  beauteous  and  all- 
captivating  Crown  Princess  Cecelie  at  his  side.  Squat- 
ting between  them,  saluting  solemnly  in  sailor-suit, 
was  their  eldest  son,  the  eight-year-old  Kaiser-to-be. 
The  ebullition  of  the  crowd  in  Unter  den  Linden  knew 
no  bounds  at  the  sight  of  the  Crown  Prince,  for  years 
Berlin's  darling.  In  striking  contrast  to  the  Kaiser's 
solemnity  was  his  heir's  smile-wreathed  face,  which, 
in  the  picturesque  German  idiom,  was  literally  freu- 
destrahlend  (radiant  of  joy).  The  specter  of  war 
was  obviously  not  depressing  the  Colonel  of  the  Death's 
Head  Hussars.  He  beamed  and  grinned  in  boyish 
happiness  as  the  mob  surged  round  his  car  so  insist- 
ently that  for  a  minute  it  could  not  proceed.     Right 


THE   CLIMAX  77 

and  left  he  stretched  out  his  arm  to  shake  hands  with 
the  frenzied  demonstrators  nearest  him.  The  Crown 
Princess  shared  her  consort's  manifest  pleasure,  while 
the  princeling  saluted  tirelessly.  Then  other  cars 
whirled  by,  containing  Prince  and  Princess  August 
Wilhelm  of  Prussia  and  the  remaining  Princes,  the 
sailor  Adalbert,  and  Eitel  Friedrich,  Joachim  and 
Oscar.  The  Hohenzollern  soldier-family  picture  was 
to  be  complete  at  this  immortal  hour.  Now  there  was  a 
fresh  outburst  of  acclamation  almost  as  volcanic  as  that 
which  greeted  the  Crown  Prince.  Admiral  Prince 
Henry,  in  navy  blue  and  steering  his  own  automobile, 
was  passing.  The  Kaiser's  brother  is  very  dear  to 
the  popular  heart  in  Germany.  As  the  Crown  Prince 
typifies  the  army,  so  Prince  Henry  stands  for  the  navy. 
The  procession  was  brought  up  by  the  funereal  Doctor 
von  Bethmann  Hollweg.  For  him  the  cheering  was 
only  desultory,  as  he  is  not  a  familiar  figure,  and 
many  of  the  crowd  obviously  had  no  notion  who  the 
worried-looking  old  gentleman  in  silk  hat  and  frock 
coat  might  be. 

The  throngs  now  streamed  toward  the  Royal  Castle 
in  the  confident  hope  that  William  the  Speechmaker 
would  not  disappoint  them.  About  six  o'clock  in  the 
evening  their  patience  and  Hochs  were  rewarded.  Sur- 
rounded by  the  members  of  his  family,  the  Kaiser 
appeared  at  the  balcony  window  facing  the  Cathedral 
across  the  Lustgarten  (this  was  more  of  the  1870  prec- 
edent) and,  looking  down  upon  the  densest  and  most 
fervent  crowd  of  his  subjects  he  ever  faced,  addressed 
to  them  in  the  guttural,  jerky,  but  wonderfully  far- 
reaching  tones  which  are  his  oratorical  style,  the  fol- 
lowing homily : 


78  THE   ASSAULT 

"A  fateful  hour  has  fallen  upon  Germany.  Envious 
people  on  all  sides  are  compelling  us  to  resort  to  just 
defense.  The  sword  is  being  forced  into  our  hand.  If 
at  the  last  hour  my  efforts  do  not  succeed  in  maintain- 
ing peace,  I  hope  that  with  God's  help  we  shall  so  wield 
the  sword  that  we  shall  be  able  to  sheathe  it  with 
honor. 

"War  would  demand  of  us  enormous  sacrifices  in 
blood  and  treasure,  but  we  shall  show  our  foes  what 
it  means  to  provoke  Germany,  and  now  I  commend 
you  all  to  God.  Go  to  church,  kneel  before  God,  and 
pray  to  Him  to  help  our  gallant  army." 

Berlin  went  to  bed  on  the  night  of  July  31  hoarse 
with  Hoching  and  footsore  from  standing  and  march- 
ing, but  now  indubitably  certain  that  events  were  im- 
pending which  would  try  the  Fatherland's  soul  as  it 
had  never  been  tried  before. 


CHAPTER  VII 

WAR 

"fTT^HE  Russian  mobilization  menace!"  That  was 
J_  the  great  myth  now  irrevocably  fastened  on  the 
German  mind.  "The  Cossacks  at  our  gate!"  Thus 
was  the  Fatherland  gulled  by  its  war  zealots  into  the 
belief  that  the  tide  of  blood  sweeping  down  from  the 
East  could  no  longer  be  stemmed.  German  war  his- 
tory was  repeating  itself.  As  1870  was  born  in  de- 
ceit, so  was  1914.  Bismarck  doctored  the  Ems  tele- 
gram forty- four  years  previous  to  extenuate  the 
assault  on  France,  and  now  the  "Russian  mobilization 
menace,"  the  Cossack  bogy,  was  invented  as  justifi- 
cation for  precipitating  and  popularizing  the  conflict 
on  which  the  Prussian  War  Party's  heart  was  set.  A 
"state  of  war"  had  been  decreed  by  the  Kaiser  in  ac- 
cordance with  the  paragraph  of  the  Imperial  Consti- 
tution which  authorizes  him  to  declare  martial  law 
whenever  the  domains  of  the  Empire  or  any  part  of 
them  are  in  jeopardy.  The  Czar's  hordes  were  gath- 
ered on  the  Eastern  frontier,  preparing  to  launch  a 
murderous,  burglarious  attack  on  innocent,  defense- 
less, peace-loving  Germany.  They  had  done  more  than 
that — and  here  was  another  Hohenzollern  1870  anal- 
ogy; the  Emperor  of  all  the  Russias  had  "insulted" 
the  Kaiser  by  feloniously  massing  his  legions  on  the 
German  border  while  William  II,  at  Nicholas'  own 
request,  was  "working  for  peace."'    It  was  a  pretty 

79 


80  THE   ASSAULT 

story,  and  German  public  opinion,  shrewdly  prepared, 
swallowed  it  whole.  Germans,  their  Emperor's  "hon- 
or" and  their  own  safety  now  at  stake,  approved  fer- 
vidly the  ultimatum  which  they  were  told  had  been  pre- 
sented at  St.  Petersburg,  demanding  abandonment 
of  the  Czar's  "provocative"  military  measures. 

I  have  too  much  respect  for  the  perfected  might  of 
the  Teutonic  war-machine  to  believe  that  any  German 
soldier  worthy  of  the  name  ever  considered  Russian 
military  movements  along  the  Prussian  and  Austrian 
frontiers  at  the  end  of  July,  1914,  a  "menace."  It 
was  only  a  fortnight  previous  that  the  German  Mili- 
tary Gazette,  the  official  army  organ,  had  laughed  the 
whole  Russian  army  out  of  court  as  an  organization 
hardly  worthy  of  Prussian  steel.  Now  the  transfer 
of  half  a  dozen  Russian  corps  had  become  so  vast  a 
peril  as  to  necessitate  plunging  the  whole  German  Em- 
pire into  a  "state  of  war !"  Everybody  who  had  eyes 
to  see  and  ears  to  hear  in  Germany,  native  and  for- 
eigner alike,  always  knew  that  actual  mobilization  in 
that  country  was  the  merest  formality.  The  Germans 
were  always  ready  for  war.  It  was  their  commonest 
boast.  A  high  officer  of  the  General  Staff,  twenty- 
four  hours  after  Serbia's  rejection  of  the  Austrian 
ultimatum,  when  asked  how  ready  Germany  was  for 
eventualities,  said,  sententiously,  "All  ready."  My 
Junker  friend,  Von  G.,  of  Kiel,  himself  a  Prussian 
officer,  would  have  snorted  with  scornful  glee  if  I  had 
ever  suggested  to  him  that  any  Russian  military  meas- 
ures could  really  "menace"  Germany.  He  knew  what 
I  knew,  and  what  anybody  with  sense  in  Germany  al- 
ways understood,  that,  compared  to  what  the  Father- 
land with  its  comprehensive  system  of  military-con- 


WAR  81 

trolled  state  railways  could  achieve  in  the  way  of  final 
"mobilization,"  Russia  would  require  weeks  where 
Germany  would  need  only  days,  or  even  hours.  Ger- 
many would  be  like  Texas,  criss-crossed  in  every  di- 
rection with  faultless  means  of  communication  and 
crammed  with  troops  and  munitions,  mobilizing 
against  the  rest  of  the  United  States,  with  the  latter 
having  to  concentrate  armies  on  the  Rio  Grande  from 
Florida,  Maine,  Oregon  and  Lower  California,  and  a 
shoe-string  railway  system  with  which  to  do  it.  The 
"Russian  mobilization  menace"  was  Germany's  su- 
preme bluff. 

St.  Petersburg  had  been  given  until  twelve  o'clock 
noon  of  Saturday,  August  1,  to  "demobilize."  Failing 
to  do  so,  Germany  would  be  "compelled  to  resort  to  a 
counter-mobilization."  France  had  been  called  upon 
to  indicate  what  her  attitude  would  be  in  case  of  a 
Russo-German  conflict,  but  the  ultimatum  to  Paris, 
we  understood,  had  no  time  limit  attached.  All  knew 
that  the  great  decision  rested  essentially  in  Russia's 
hands;  that  war  with  the  Czar  meant  war  with  the 
French,  too.  Twelve  o'clock  Berlin  time  came  and 
went  without  word  of  any  kind  from  Count  Pourtales, 
the  Kaiser's  ambassador  in  St.  Petersburg.  The  Em- 
peror and  his  civil,  military  and  naval  advisers  were 
closeted  in  a  Crown  council  at  the  Castle.  Pourtales' 
message,  if  there  was  one,  the  Foreign  Office  told  us, 
would  doubtless  reach  the  Kaiser  in  the  midst  of  the 
council,  which  was  a  continuous  one.  Berlin  waited 
in  excruciating  impatience.  The  Bourse  writhed  in 
panic.  Bankers  met  to  consider  closing  it  altogether, 
but  decided  that  the  worst  might  be  avoided  by  lim- 
iting transactions  to  spot-cash  deals.    The  air  was  elec- 


82  THE   ASSAULT 

trie  with  rumor.  Russia  had  asked  for  a  further  pe- 
riod of  grace,  one  heard.  Hope,  report  said,  while 
slender,  was  not  yet  utterly  vanished. 

The  afternoon  passed  in  almost  insufferable  anxi- 
ety. Unter  den  Linden  and  the  Lustgarten,  the 
sprawling  area  around  the  Castle,  were  choked  with 
people  tense  with  expectancy.  Dread,  rather  than  war 
fervor,  inspired  them.  About  five-twenty  o'clock,  after 
one  of  the  daily  heart-to-heart  war  talks  I  had  been 
privileged  to  hold  over  the  teacups  with  Mrs.  Gerard,  I 
drove  through  the  Wilhelmstrasse  toward  the  Linden, 
accompanied  by  my  English  colleague,  Charles  Tower, 
Berlin  representative  of  the  New  York  World  and  Lon- 
don Daily  News.  I  do  not  suppose  the  historic  little 
spectacle  was  specially  arranged  in  our  honor,  but  as  a 
matter  of  fact  we  happened  to  pass  the  Foreign  Office 
at  the  very  instant  that  Doctor  von  Bethmann  Hollweg, 
grave  with  inconcealable  worry,  was  entering  a  plebe- 
ian taxicab.  He  was  evidently  starting  out  on  a  tran- 
scendent mission,  for  he  held  in  his  hand  a  document 
of  such  absorbing  interest  that  he  hardly  raised  his 
eyes  from  it  as  he  clambered  into  the  cab.  Accom- 
panying him  were  Foreign  Secretary  von  Jagow  and 
a  military  aide-de-camp.  I  blush  to  confess  that  Tower 
and  I  were  filled  with  such  overweening  curiosity  to 
find  out  what  that  ominous  parchment  contained,  and 
where  the  Chancellor  was  taking  it,  that  we  ordered 
our  chauffeur  to  follow  at  not  too  respectful  a  dis- 
tance. I  never  saw  a  Berlin  taxi  tear  through  the 
heart  of  the  down-town  district  so  madly  as  Bethmann 
Hollweg  scorched  down  the  Behren-strasse,  past  the 
banks  which  line  Germany's  Wall  Street  and  the  back 
of  the  Opera,  into  Franzosische-strasse,  over  the  little 


WAR  83 

bridge  which  spans  the  canal,  and  into  the  southern 
esplanade  of  the  castle.  Only  small  crowds  were  gath- 
ered at  this  point,  and  the  Chancellor's  cab  swung  past 
the  sentries  and  through  the  big  Neptune  Gate  of  the 
Schloss  almost  unnoticed.  Now  instinctively  certain 
of  the  nature  of  Bethmann  Hollweg's  errand,  Tower 
and  I  made  our  way  to  the  Lustgarten,  since  early 
morning  an  endless  vista  of  faces  stretching  nearly  all 
the  way  from  the  Dom  to  the  Brandenburg  Gate  end 
of  Unter  den  Linden,  a  mile  to  the  west.  We  felt 
sure  that  the  universally  awaited  Order  of  Mobiliza- 
tion might  be  momentarily  expected.  As  events  de- 
veloped, that  was  the  document  which  we  had  seen  the 
Chancellor  taking  to  the  Kaiser.  It  was  six  o'clock. 
The  doleful  chimes  of  the  Cathedral  across  from  the 
Castle  were  summoning  the  people  to  the  service  of 
intercession  ordained  by  the  Emperor  earlier  in  the 
day.  Solemnity  hung  over  the  multitude  like  a  pall. 
Men  and  women  knew  now  that  Russia's  answer,  or 
lack  of  answer,  whichever  it  might  be,  meant  war,  not 
peace.  They  had  not  long  to  wait  for  confirmatory 
news.  As  soon  as  word  was  telephoned  to  the  Wolff 
Agency,  the  official  news  bureau,  that  the  Imperial  sig- 
nature had  at  length  been  officially  given — that  the 
sword  was  now,  literally  and  beyond  recall,  "forced" 
into  William  II's  hands — the  newspapers,  which  had 
had  sufficient  advance  information  for  their  purposes, 
drenched  the  capital  with  Extrablatter  containing  the 
fateful  tidings : 


UNIVERSAL  MOBILIZATION  OF  THE 
GERMAN  ARMY  AND  NAVY  !" 


84  THE   ASSAULT 

Another  two  lines  explained,  breathlessly,  that  an  or- 
der to  that  effect  had  just  been  promulgated  by  the 
Supreme  War  Lord.  The  twelve-hour  period  which 
Germany  had  granted  to  Russia  for  "the  making  of 
a  loyal  declaration"  had  been  ignored.  To-morrow, 
added  the  chief  announcement  in  the  most  portentous 
Extrablatt  a  German  newspaper  ever  issued,  would  be 
the  first  mobilization  day.  All  Sunday,  Monday  and 
Tuesday  the  Furor  Teutonicus  would  be  busy  donning 
shining  armor.  The  deed  was  done.  "Gentlemen," 
the  Kaiser  is  said  to  have  remarked  to  Moltke,  Falken- 
hayn  and  the  rest  of  the  military  clique,  after  affixing 
his  signature  to  the  document  which  meant  not  only 
mobilization,  but  war,  "you  will  live  to  regret  this." 

In  the  midst  of  our  exclusively  German  environment 
in  those  immortal  hours — we  could  now  neither  tele- 
graph nor  telephone  in  anything  except  German,  nor 
even  read  in  anything  except  that  language,  for  for- 
eign newspapers  were  no  longer  arriving — I  must  con- 
fess I  was  filled  with  no  little  prepossession  in  Ger- 
many's favor.  The  Kaiser's  case  seemed  not  only 
good.  On  the  biased  evidence  available — we  had,  of 
course,  no  other — it  even  seemed  strong.  Such  frag- 
mentary dispatches  from  abroad  as  the  Military  Censor, 
already  enthroned,  permitted  to  be  printed  were  nat- 
urally only  those  which  resolutely  bolstered  up  the 
fiction  of  "our  just  cause."  Of  the  stealthy  plot  to 
violate  Belgium  we  had  no  glimmer  of  an  inkling.  We 
knew  only  of  the  "Russian  mobilization  menace,"  of 
the  Kaiser's  wrecked  efforts  in  the  direction  of  "peace," 
and  of  the  reluctance  with  which  impeccable  Germany 
was  stripping  for  the  fray  in  defense  of  her  honor, 
rights  and  imperiled  territorial  integrity.     Convinced 


WAR  85 

as  I  had  long  been  of  the  War  Party's  lust  for  "the 
Day,"  a  setting  appeared  to  have  been  contrived  which 
put  Germany  in  a  plausible,  if  not  altogether  blameless, 
light.  It  was  mass-suggestion,  as  a  Berlin  psycholo- 
gist would  describe  it,  all-hypnotizing  in  its  effects.  It 
was  not  until  five  days  afterward,  when  I  had  crossed 
the  German  frontier,  reached  Dutch  territory  and 
come  up  with  the  truth  that  the  curtain  was  lifted  and 
I  could  look  out  upon  what  seemed,  after  ten  days  of 
"inspired"  information  in  Berlin,  like  country  which 
my  eyes  had  never  seen  before.     .     .     . 

The  Mobilization  Order  tore  through  the  capital 
with  the  velocity  and  the  shock  of  a  shell.  Expected, 
it  yet  stunned.  The  throng  before  the  Castle  still  sang 
Deutschland,  Deutschland  iiber  Alles  and  cheered 
for  the  Kaiser,  and  desultory  processions  of  young 
men  and  boys  still  marched  hither  and  thither  across 
the  town.  But  an  atmosphere  of  soberness  and  grim 
reality  now  descended  upon  Berlin.  The  street-corner 
pillars  which  serve  as  bill-boards  in  Germany  were  al- 
ready splashed  red  with  the  official  decree,  gazetting 
August  2,  3  and  4  as  the  days  when  the  Kaiser's  sub- 
jects, liable  for  military  service  with  the  first  line  (Re- 
serve), must  report  at  long-appointed  assembly  depots, 
don  long-ready  uniforms,  and  march  each  to  his  long- 
designated  place  in  the  long-prepared  war.  Almost 
simultaneously  the  telegraph,  now  like  the  railway  and 
postal  services  automatically  passed  into  military  con- 
trol, brought  every  reservist  in  the  realm  definite  in- 
formation as  to  where  and  when  he  was  expected  to 
present  himself.  The  magic  system  which  Roon  de- 
vised for  hurling  Germany's  legions  across  the  Rhine 
in  '70  was  once  again  in  mechanical,  yet  noiseless,  mo- 


86  THE   ASSAULT 

tion.  Sheer  jubilation,  the  grand-stand  patriotism  with 
which  Berlin  had  reverberated  for  a  week,  died  out. 
There  were  good-bys  to  be  said  now,  long  good-bys, 
and  affairs  to  be  wound  up.  The  iron  business  of  war 
was  waiting  to  be  attended  to.  The  crowds  in  Unter 
den  Linden  and  the  Lustgarten  melted  homeward,  si- 
lently, immersed  in  anxious  reflection.  Before  they 
waked  from  their  next  sleep,  the  first  shot  might  be 
fired.  On  what  new  paths  had  the  Fatherland  entered  ? 
Would  they  lead  to  death  or  glory?  Never  before,  I 
imagine,  was  the  modern  German,  in  his  inimitable 
idiom,  given  so  furiously  to  think. 

The  war  began  early  Sunday  morning,  August  2. 
Before  nine  o'clock  "Extras"  were  in  the  streets  with 
the  following  official  news,  the  very  first  bulletin  of 
the  war : 

"Up  to  4  o'clock  this  morning  the  Great  Gen- 
eral Staff  has  received  the  following  reports : 

"1.  During  the  night  Russian  patrols  made 
an  attack  on  the  railway  bridge  over  the 
Warthe  near  Eichenried  (East  Prussia).  The 
attack  was  repulsed.  On  the  German  side,  two 
slightly  wounded.  Russian  losses  unknown. 
An  attempted  attack  by  the  Russians  on  the 
railway  station  at  Miloslaw  was  frustrated. 

"2.  The  station  master  at  Johannisburg  and 
the  forestry  authorities  at  Bialla  report  that 
during  last  night  (1st  to  2nd)  Russian  columns 
in  considerable  strength,  with  guns,  crossed  the 
frontier  near  Schwidden  (southeast  of  Bialla) 
and  that  two  squadrons  of  Cossacks  are  riding 
in  the  direction  of  Johannisburg.     The  tele- 


WAR  87 

phone  communication  between  Lyck  and  Bialla 
is  broken  down. 

"According  to  the  above,  Russia  has  at- 
tacked German  Imperial  territory  and  begun 
the  war." 

The  "Russian  mobilization  menace"  was  now  an  ac- 
complished fact,  and  the  Cossack  bogy,  too,  converted 
into  an  officially  hall-marked  actuality ! 

Modern  war,  from  the  newspaperman's  standpoint, 
consists  principally  of  two  things — censorship  and  ru- 
mors. Both  had  now  set  in  with  a  vengeance.  The 
first  day  in  Berlin  swarmed  with  irresponsible  report. 
People  believed  anything.  Official  news  was  scarce 
and  "far  between."  The  second  General  Staff  bulletin 
to  be  issued  was  a  laconic  announcement  that  troops 
of  the  VIII  (Rhenish)  army  corps  had  occupied  Lux- 
emburg "for  the  protection  of  German  railways  in 
the  Grand  Duchy."  Eydtkuhnen,  the  famous  German 
frontier  station  opposite  the  Russian  border  town  of 
Wirballen,  was  now  reported  occupied  by  Russian  cav- 
alry detachments.  A  Russian  had  been  caught  in  the 
act  of  trying  to  blow  up  the  Thorn  railway  bridge. 
Now  France — like  Russia,  "without  declaration  of 
war" — had  violated  the  sacredness  of  German  terri- 
tory. French  aviators  had  flown  into  Bavaria  and 
dropped  bombs  in  the  neighborhood  of  Nuremberg, 
evidently  with  the  intent  of  destroying  military  rail- 
way lines.  Canard  succeeded  canard.  The  famed 
"German  war  on  two  fronts"  was  no  longer  a  figment 
of  the  imagination.  It  had  become  immutable  fact. 
Monsieur  Sverbieff,  the  Czar's  ambassador,  we  heard, 
had  already  received  his  passports.     He  would  leave 


88  THE   ASSAULT 

Berlin  in  the  evening  in  a  special  train  to  the  Russian 
frontier.  When  would  Monsieur  Cambon,  the  French 
ambassador,  the  Republic's  accomplished  representa- 
tive in  Washington  during  our  war  with  Spain,  be 
given  his  walking-papers  ?  So  far  rowdies  had  yelled 
Deutschland,  Deutschland  iiber  Alles  only  in  front  of 
the  Russian  Embassy.  Now  that  French  airmen  had 
shelled  Bavaria,  how  long  would  it  be  before  the 
chateau  in  Pariser  Platz  would  be  stormed? 

The  British  Embassy  was  wrapped  in  Sabbath  calm. 
Was  not  Berlin  reading  with  intensest  gratification 
the  Wolff  Agency's  carefully  selected  London  dis- 
patches saying  that  "powerful  influences  are  at  work 
to  prevent  England  becoming  involved  in  the  war"? 
Mr.  Norman  Angell  had  written  in  that  sense  to  The 
Times — the  Lokal-Anzeiger  reported  with  undisguised 
satisfaction.  A  large  number  of  British  professors, 
it  added,  had  launched  a  "protest"  against  war  with 
Germany,  "the  leader  in  art  and  science  and  against 
whom  a  war  for  Russia  and  Serbia  would  be  a  crime 
against  civilization."  A  "great  and  influential  meet- 
ing of  Liberals  in  the  Reform  Club"  had  adopted  res- 
olutions commending  Sir  Edward  Grey's  efforts  on 
behalf  of  peace  and  "energetically  demanding  the 
strict  preservation  of  English  neutrality."  The  Ger- 
mans took  heart.  Blandly  ignorant  of  their  Govern- 
ment's secret  diplomatic  schemings,  now  in  frantic 
progress,  to  keep  Great  Britain  out  of  the  fray,  they 
were  lulled  by  their  rulers  and  doctored  press  reports 
into  thinking  that  the  danger  of  interference  from  the 
other  side  of  the  North  Sea  was  as  good  as  non- 
existent. The  German  Imperial  Government  practised 
this  deception  on  their  own  people  till  the  last  possi- 


WAR  89 

ble  moment.  German  newspaper  readers,  in  those  fit- 
ful hours,  were  being  led  to  believe  that  the  voice  of 
Britain  was  the  pacifist,  pro-German  voice  of  Radical- 
ism as  represented  by  journals  like  The  Daily  News, 
Westminster  Gazette  and  The  Nation.  No  intimation 
was  permitted  to  reach  the  German  public  that  voices 
like  The  Times,  The  Observer,  The  Daily  Mail,  The 
Morning  Post  and  Daily  Telegraph  were  calling  for 
the  only  action  by  the  Government  consonant  with 
British  honor  and  British  rights.  The  outburst  of 
fanatical  rage  against  the  "perfidious  sister  nation" 
so  soon  to  ensue  was  mainly  due,  I  shall  always  re- 
main convinced,  to  the  diabolical  swindle  of  which  the 
German  nation  was  the  victim  at  the  hands  of  its 
dark-lantern  diplomatists.  In  that  far-off  day  when 
the  scales  have  fallen  from  Teutonic  eyes,  I  predict 
that  the  Germans  will  call  for  vengeance  on  their  de- 
ceivers. As  they  were  duped  about  Russia,  so  were 
they  deliberately  misled  about  England. 

Before  the  war  was  half  a  day  old  the  spy  mania, 
which  was  destined  to  be  one  of  the  most  amazing 
symptoms  of  the  war's  early  hours,  was  raging  madly 
from  one  end  of  the  country  to  the  other.  It  was  di- 
rectly inspired  and  encouraged  by  the  Government. 
The  authorities  caused  it  to  be  known  that  "according 
to  reliable  news"  Russian  officers  and  secret  agents 
infested  the  Fatherland  "in  great  numbers."  "The  se- 
curity of  the  German  Empire,"  the  people  were  in- 
formed, "demands  absolutely  that  in  addition  to  the 
regular  official  organs,  the  entire  population  should 
give  vent  to  its  patriotic  sentiments  by  co-operating  in 
the  apprehension  of  such  dangerous  persons."  "By 
active  and  restless  vigilance,"  continued  this  official  in- 


90  THE   ASSAULT 

citement  to  lynch  law,  "everybody  can  in  his  own  way 
contribute  toward  a  successful  result  of  the  war."  It 
was  not  to  be  expected  that  a  nation  so  idolatrous  of 
officialdom  as  the  Germans  could  possibly  resist 
this  carte-blanche  permit  to  every  man  to  play  the 
role  of  an  avenging  sleuth.  The  inevitable  result  was 
that  Germany  became  in  a  flash  the  scene  of  a 
nation-wide  "drive"  for  spies,  real  or  imaginary.  Any- 
body who  was  either  known  to  be  a  Russian  or  re- 
motely suspected  of  being  one,  or  who  even  looked 
like  a  Russian,  was  in  imminent  danger  of  his  life. 
Now  the  notorious  story  of  "poisoning  of  wells  in 
Alsace  by  French  army  surgeons"  was  circulated. 
"Hunt  for  French  spies!"  promptly  read  the  newest 
invitation  to  mob  violence.  Weird  "news"  began  to 
fill  the  Extrabl'dtter.  A  "Russian  spy"  had  been 
caught  in  Unter  den  Linden,  masquerading  as  a  Ger- 
man naval  officer.  After  being  beaten  into  insensibil- 
ity, he  was  dragged  to  Spandau  and  shot.  In  another 
part  of  town  a  couple  of  Russian  "secret  agents,"  dis- 
guised as  women,  were  caught  with  "basketfuls  of 
bombs."  They,  too,  we  learned,  were  riddled  with  bul- 
lets an  hour  later  at  Spandau.  Everywhere,  in  and 
out  of  Berlin,  the  spy-hunt  was  now  in  full  cry.  An 
automobile,  in  which  women  were  traveling,  was  "re- 
ported" to  be  crossing  the  country,  en  route  to  Russia 
with  "millions  of  francs  of  gold."  The  whole  rural 
population  of  Prussia  turned  out  to  intercept  it. 

One  of  the  earliest  victims  of  the  espionage  epidemic 
was  an  American  newspaperman,  Seymour  Beach 
Conger,  the  chief  Berlin  correspondent  of  the  Associ- 
ated Press,  who  had  started  for  St.  Petersburg,  where 
he  was  formerly  stationed,  as  soon  as  war  became  im- 


WAR  91 

minent,  only  to  be  arrested  by  the  spy-hunting  Prussian 
police  at  Gumbinnen  on  the  charge  of  being  "a  Russian 
grand-duke."  Conger's  United  States  passport,  unmis- 
takable journalistic  credentials,  well-known  official 
status  in  Berlin  and  convincingly  American  exterior 
availed  him  not.  He  had  plenty  of  money  and  a  ko- 
dak, and  that  was  enough.  He  must  be  a  spy.  For  three 
days  and  nights  he  was  locked  in  a  cell,  and,  even  after 
he  had  contrived  to  establish  communication  with  the 
American  Embassy  in  Berlin,  he  had  great  difficulty  in 
securing  his  release.  It  was  eventually  granted  on  the 
understanding  that  he  should  ignore  the  Associated 
Press'  orders  to  proceed  to  Russia  and  remain  in  Ber- 
lin for  the  rest  of  the  war,  where,  I  believe,  he  still 
is.  I  was  told,  but  could  never  verify,  that  one  of 
the  conditions  of  Conger's  liberation  was  that  he 
should  not  "talk  about"  the  affair. 

How  many  hapless  persons,  Russians,  French  or  un- 
fortunates suspected  of  being  such,  with  nothing  in  the 
world  against  them  more  incriminating  than  their  real 
or  imagined  nationality,  were  put  out  of  the  way  either 
by  German  mob  savagery,  police  brutality  or  fortress 
firing-squads  in  those  opening  forty-eight  hours  of 
Armageddon  will  probably  never  be  known.  I  do  not 
suppose  the  Germans  themselves  know.  But  this  / 
know — that  even  at  that  earliest  stage  of  their  sangui- 
nary game  they  conducted  themselves  in  a  manner 
which,  had  they  done  no  other  single  thing  during  the 
war  to  stagger  humanity,  would  brand  them  as  a  race 
of  semi-barbarians.  Kultur  gave  a  sorry  account  of 
itself  in  the  Hottentot  days  between  August  2  and  5, 
of  which  I  shall  have  more  to  say,  of  a  peculiarly  per- 
sonal nature,  in  a  succeeding  chapter. 


92  THE   ASSAULT 

War  Sunday  in  Berlin,  midst  rumor  and  spy-chas- 
ing, was  marked  by  an  impressive  open-air  divine  serv- 
ice on  the  Konigs-Platz,  that  vast  quadrangle  of 
spread-eagle  statuary  and  gingerbread  architecture  in 
which  the  sepulchral  "Avenue  of  Victory"  culminates. 
In  the  great  area  between  the  Column  of  Victory  and 
the  bulky  Bismarck  memorial  at  the  foot  of  the  gilt* 
domed  Reichstag  building  a  concourse  of  many  thou* 
sands  gathered  to  hear  a  court  chaplain,  Doctor 
Dohring,  sermonize  eloquently  on  a  text  from  the  Rev- 
elation of  St.  John,  chapter  II,  verse  10:  "Be  thou 
faithful  unto  death,  and  I  will  give  thee  a  crown  of 
life."  It  was  a  singularly  appropriate  theme,  for  hun- 
dreds of  reservists,  their  last  day  in  citizens'  clothes, 
were  in  the  throng.  There  was  a  moment  of  in- 
describable pathos,  as  the  chaplain,  from  a  dais  which 
raised  him  high  above  the  heads  of  the  multitude,  in- 
voked the  huge  congregation  to  recite  with  him  the 
Lord's  Prayer.  Strong  men  and  women  were  in  tears 
when  the  Amen  was  reached.  The  service  was  brought 
to  a  close  with  a  beautiful  rendition  by  that  mighty 
chorus  of  the  Niederl'dndisches  Dankgebet,  the  famous 
hymn  which  proclaimed  at  Waterloo  a  century  before 
the  end  of  the  Napoleonic  terror. 

Nightfall  found  those  seemingly  immobile  Berlin 
thousands  still  clustered,  now  almost  beseechingly, 
round  the  Royal  Castle.  They  hungered  for  an  op- 
portunity to  show  the  Supreme  War  Lord  that  Kaiser 
and  Empire  were  dearer  than  ever  to  German  hearts 
in  the  hour  of  imminent  trial.  Just  before  dark,  while 
his  outlines  could  still  be  plainly  distinguished  even 
by  the  rearmost  ranks  of  the  crowd,  William  II,  thun- 
derously greeted,  stepped  out  once  more  to  the  balcony 


WAR  93 

from  which  he  had  told  the  populace  two  nights  pre- 
vious that  the  sword  was  being  "forced"  into  his  hand. 
He  beckoned  for  silence.  Men  reverently  removed 
their  hats,  and  leaned  forward  on  tiptoes,  the  better 
to  hear  the  Imperial  message.  This  is  what  the  Kaiser 
said: 

"From  the  bottom  of  my  heart  I  thank  you  for  the 
expression  of  your  love  and  your  loyalty.  In  the  strug- 
gle now  impending  I  know  no  more  parties  among  my 
people.  There  are  now  only  Germans  among  us. 
Whichever  parties,  in  the  heat  of  political  differences, 
may  have  turned  against  me,  I  now  forgive  from  the 
depths  of  my  heart.  The  thing  now  is  that  all  should 
stand  together,  shoulder  to  shoulder,  like  brothers,  and 
then  God  will  help  the  German  sword  to  victory !" 

No  historian  of  Germany  in  war-time  will  be  able 
to  say  that  his  people  did  not  take  the  Kaiser's  stirring 
admonition  to  heart. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THE  AMERICANS 

ON  THE  occasion,  nine  or  ten  years  ago,  when 
it  was  my  privilege  to  be  presented  for  the  first 
time  to  that  most  sane  and  suave  of  German  statesmen, 
Prince  Biilow — it  was  at  one  of  his  so-called  "par- 
liamentary evenings"  at  the  Imperial  Chancellor's  Pal- 
ace during  the  political  season, — he  inquired,  pleas- 
antly : 

"How  long  are  you  remaining  in  Germany?" 
"Just  as  long  as  Your  Serene  Highness  will  permit," 
I  responded,  half  facetiously  and  half  seriously,  for 
foreign  correspondents  are  occasionally  expelled  from 
Germany  for  pernicious  professional  activity. 

For  the  ten  days  preceding  August  1,  1914,  while 
the  European  cloudburst  was  gathering  momentum, 
such  time  as  I  could  spare  from  the  chase  for  the 
nimble  item  was  devoted  to  patching  up  my  journal- 
istic fences  in  Berlin,  with  a  view  to  remaining  there 
throughout  the  war.  There  was  at  that  time  no  con- 
clusive indication  that  England  would  be  involved. 
Having  seen  Germany  in  full  and  magnificent  stride  in 
peace,  I  was  overwhelmingly  anxious  to  watch  her  in 
the  practise  of  her  real  profession.  As  an  American 
citizen  and  special  correspondent  of  three  great  Ameri- 
can newspapers — the  New  York  Times,  Philadelphia 
Public  Ledger  and  Chicago  Tribune — and  fully  accred- 

94 


THE   AMERICANS  95 

ited  as  such  in  German  official  quarters,  I  had  every 
reason  to  hope  that,  even  if  England  were  drawn  into 
the  war  (as  to  which  I,  myself,  was  never  in  doubt), 
my  previous  status  as  Berlin  correspondent  of  Lord 
Northcliffe's  Daily  Mail  would  not  interfere  with  my 
remaining  in  Germany  as  an  American  writing  ex- 
clusively for  American  papers.  It  was,  of  course, 
obvious  that  if  this  permission  were  granted  me,  my 
connection  with  the  British  news  organization,  which 
for  years  was  Germany's  bete  noire,  would  have  auto- 
matically to  cease. 

In  Ambassador  Gerard,  as  ever,  I  found  a  ready 
supporter  of  my  plans.  He  recognized,  as  I  did,  that 
a  "Daily  Mail  man,"  particularly  one  who  had  special- 
ized, as  I  did  for  eight  years,  in  publishing  as  much 
as  I  dared  about  Germany's  palpable  preparations  for 
war,  would  perhaps  be  on  thin  ice  in  asking  favors 
of  the  Kaiser's  Government  at  such  an  hour.  But 
Judge  Gerard  also  knew  that,  while  persistently  doing 
my  duty  in  reporting  the  sleepless  machinations  of  the 
German  War  Party  to  attain  "a  place  in  the  sun,"  I 
had  written  copiously  in  England  and  with  equal  faith- 
fulness of  the  many  attractive  and  favorable  aspects 
of  German  life  and  institutions.  In  1913  I  produced  a 
little  book,  Men  Around  the  Kaiser,  which  from  cover 
to  cover  was  a  sincere  hymn  of  praise  of  almost  every- 
thing Teutonic.  This  foreigner's  tribute  to  the  real 
source  of  modern  German  greatness — the  Fatherland's 
captains  of  science,  art,  letters,  commerce,  finance  and 
industry — was  considered  so  fair  and  flattering  to  the 
Germans  that  Manner  um  den  Kaiser,  a  German  trans- 
lation, went  through  eight  editions  to  the  two  of  the 
English  original.    During  the  Zabern  army  upheaval 


96  THE   ASSAULT 

in  Alsace-Lorraine  in  the  winter  of  1913-14  an  article 
of  mine  in  The  Daily  Mail  entitled  "What  the  Colonel 
Said"  was  the  only  presentation  of  the  German  mili- 
tary attitude  published  in  England.  Even  the  War 
Party  newspapers  in  Berlin  honored  me  with  a  repro- 
production  of  that  attempt  to  interpret  the  Prussian 
point  of  view  that,  where  the  sacredness  of  the  King's 
tunic  is  at  stake,  all  other  considerations  vanish  into 
insignificance. 

The  Ambassador  suggested,  in  the  always  practical 
way  of  American  diplomacy,  that  I  should  assemble 
for  him  a  dossier  of  some  of  my  newspaper  work  in 
Berlin  showing  that  I  had  consistently  attempted  to 
show  the  bright,  as  well  as  the  dark  side,  of  the  Ger- 
man picture.  Judge  Gerard  promised  to  submit  my 
desire  to  remain  in  Germany  during  war,  if  war 
came,  to  Foreign  Secretary  von  Jagow  and  to  recom- 
mend that  my  aspiration  should  be  gratified.  It  was 
welcome  news  which  the  Ambassador  was  finally  en- 
abled to  give  me  on  August  1,  that  the  Foreign  Secre- 
tary had  considered  my  application  and  granted  it.  I 
rejoiced  that  a  long-cherished  ambition  seemed  on  the 
brink  of  realization — to  see  the  terrible  German  war- 
machine  at  work,  to  report  its  sanguinary  operations 
from  the  inside,  and  perhaps  some  day  to  record  in 
a  book,  which  would  have  been  incomparably  more 
vital  than  this  bloodless  narrative,  my  close-range  im- 
pressions of  man-killing  as  an  applied  art. 

I  was  not  the  only  American  appealing  to  our  Em- 
bassy for  amelioration  of  my  troubles  about  this  time. 
In  fact  there  were  so  many  others — hundreds  and  hun- 
dreds of  them — that  the  Ambassador  and  his  small 
staff  ceased  altogether  to  be  diplomats  and  became 


THE   AMERICANS  97, 

merely  comforters  of  distracted  compatriots  plunged 
suddenly  into  the  abyss  of  terror  and  helplessness  in 
a  strange  land  by  the  specter  of  war.  From  early 
morning  till  long  past  midnight  Wilhelms  Platz  7,  the 
dignified  home  maintained  by  the  Gerards  as  Amer- 
ican headquarters  in  Germany,  was  besieged  by  a  mob 
of  stranded  or  semi-stranded  fellow  citizens  who 
flocked  to  the  Embassy  like  chicks  running  to  cover 
beneath  the  protecting  wing  of  a  mother  hen.  Never 
even  in  the  history  of  Cook's  was  so  frantic  a  conclave 
of  the  personally  conducted  assembled.  They  wanted 
two  things  and  wanted  them  at  once — money  and  fa- 
cilities to  get  out  of  Germany  with  the  least  possible 
delay.  That  bespectacled  school-marm  from  Paducah, 
Kentucky,  had  not  come  to  Berlin  to  eat  war  bread 
and  spend  her  spare  time  proving  her  identity  at  the 
police  station — she  moaned  in  tearful  accents.  That 
aldermanic  committee  of  Battle  Creek,  Michigan,  was 
not  getting  what  it  bargained  for — study  of  Berlin's 
sewage  farms  and  municipal  labor  exchanges.  Its 
main  concern  now  was  to  reach  Dutch  or  Scandinavian 
territory,  with  the  minimum  of  procrastination.  That 
portly  Chicago  millionaire's  wife  yonder,  when  she 
bought  a  letter  of  credit  on  the  Dresdner  Bank,  had 
not  figured  even  on  the  remote  possibility  of  its  refus- 
ing to  hand  her  over  all  the  money  she  might  care  to 
draw.  The  moment  had  come,  she  was  vociferating, 
to  see  what  "American  citizenship  amounts  to,  any- 
how," and  what  she  demanded  was  a  special  train  to 
warless  frontiers,  and  then  a  ship  to  take  her  "home." 
These  were  just  a  few  of  the  plaints  and  claims  which 
issued  in  a  crescendo  of  insistence  and  panic  from  these 
neurotic  tourist  folk,  who,  in  tones  often  more  imperi- 


98  [THE   ASSAULT 

ous  than  appealing,  wanted  to  know  what  "Our  Gov- 
ernment" intended  to  do  with  its  war  refugees  and 
refugettes  cruelly  trapped  in  Armageddonland. 

Americans  who  come  to  Europe  proverbially  feel  a 
proprietary  interest  in  their  Embassies,  Legations  and 
Consulates.  The  Berlin  Ambassador  for  years  put  in 
much  valuable  time  assuaging  the  grief  and  disap- 
pointment of  brother  patriots  who  felt  a  God-given 
right  to  gratify  such  trifling  ambitions  as  an  audience 
with  the  Kaiser,  an  inspection  of  the  German  army 
or  minor  favors  like  exploration  of  the  German 
educational  system  under  the  personal  chaperonage 
of  the  Minister  for  Culture.  Then,  of  course,  there 
was  the  ever-present  "German-Americans,"  who,  hav- 
ing slipped  away  from  their  beloved  Fatherland  in 
youth  without  performing  military  service,  would  risk 
a  visit  to  native  haunts  in  later  life,  only  to  fall  victim 
to  the  German  military  police  system  which  has  a  long 
memory  and  a  still  longer  arm  for  such  transgressors. 
On  many  such  an  occasion,  even  when,  like  a  Chicago 
man  I  know,  the  "German-American"  stole  back  un- 
der an  assumed  name,  the  paternal  diplomatic  inter- 
vention of  the  United  States  has  saved  the  "deserter" 
from  a  felon's  cell  in  his  "Fatherland." 

By  the  morning  of  August  4,  the  American  panic 
in  Berlin  began  to  assume  truly  disastrous  dimensions. 
The  Embassy  was  literally  jammed  with  fretting  men, 
and  weepy  women  and  children.  Every  room  over- 
flowed with  them.  The  cry  was  now  for  passports.  It 
was  coming  from  all  parts  of  the  country.  All  for- 
eigners were  suspect,  English-speaking  ones  in  partic- 
ular, and  the  German  police  were  demanding  in  martial 
tone  that  Auslander  should  "legitimatize"  themselves. 


THE   AMERICANS  99 

The  railways  were  available  now  only  for  troops. 
The  Hamburg-American  and  North  German  Lloyd 
had  canceled  all  their  west-bound  sailings,  and  our 
Consular  officials  in  Hamburg  and  Bremen  were  tele- 
graphing the  Berlin  Embassy  that  they,  too,  were 
stormed  by  throngs  of  Americans  in  various  stages 
of  anxiety,  fear  and  financial  embarrassment.  From 
Frank fort-on-the-Main  came  a  similar  tale  of  woe.  All 
around  that  delightful  city  are  famous  German  water- 
ing places  —  Bad  Nauheim,  Homburg,  Wiesbaden, 
Langen-Schwalbach,  Baden-Baden,  Kissingen  and  the 
like — and  American  "cure-guests,"  regardless  of  their 
rheumatism,  heart  troubles,  gout  and  other  frailties 
for  which  German  waters  are  a  panacea,  forgot  such 
insignificant  woes  in  the  now  crowning  anguish  to  own 
a  passport  which  would  designate  them  as  peaceable 
and  peace-loving  children  of  the  Stars  and  Stripes. 

The  Embassy  rapidly  and  patiently  mastered  the  sit- 
uation. Mrs.  Gerard  converted  herself  into  the  adopted 
mother  of  every  lachrymose  American  woman  and 
child  squatted  on  her  broad  marble  staircase.  Mrs. 
Gherardi,  the  wife  of  our  Naval  Attache,  and  Mrs. 
Ruddock,  the  wife  of  the  Third  Secretary,  who  were  at 
the  time  the  only  feminine  members  of  the  Embassy 
family,  resourcefully  seconded  the  Ambassadress'  ef- 
forts to  soothe  the  emotions  of  the  sobbing  sisters  and 
youngsters  from  Iowa  and  Maine,  from  Pennsylvania 
and  Texas,  from  Montana  and  Florida,  and  from 
nearly  all  the  other  States  of  the  Union,  who  refused 
to  view  qualmless  the  prospect  of  remaining  shut  up 
for  Heaven  knew  how  long  in  war-mad  Germany,  al- 
ready effectually  isolated  from  the  rest  of  the  world 
behind  an  impenetrable  ring  of  steel.    As  for  the  men 


100  THE   ASSAULT 

of  the  Embassy,  from  the  Ambassador  down  to  "Wil- 
helm,"  the  old  German  doorkeeper  who  has  initiated 
two  generations  of  American  diplomats  into  the  mys- 
teries of  their  profession  in  Berlin,  no  faithful  serv- 
ants of  an  ungrateful  Republic  ever  came  so  valiantly 
to  the  rescue  of  fellow  taxpayers.  The  Embassy 
apartments,  including  the  Ambassador's  own  sanctu- 
ary, were  turned  into  offices  which  looked  for  all  the 
world  like  a  Census  Bureau.  Every  available  space 
for  a  desk  was  usurped  by  somebody  taking  applica- 
tions for  passports  or  filling  up  the  passports  them- 
selves, to  be  turned  over  to  Judge  Gerard  in  an  un- 
ceasing stream  for  his  signature  and  seal.  Uncle  Sam 
surely  never  raked  in  so  many  two-dollar  fees  at  one 
killing  in  all  the  history  of  his  Berlin  office.  Nor 
did  American  citizens,  I  fancy,  ever  part  with  money 
which  they  considered  half  so  good  an  investment. 

The  Embassy  itself,  hopelessly  understaffed  for  such 
an  emergency,  was,  of  course,  quite  unequal  to  the 
enormous  strain  suddenly  imposed  upon  it,  so  volunteer 
attaches  and  clerks  were  gladly  pressed  into  service. 
There,  for  instance,  sat  a  Guggenheim  copper  magnate, 
who  probably  never  lifts  a  pen  except  to  sign  a  million- 
dollar  check,  at  work  with  a  mantel-piece  as  a  desk, 
recording  the  vital  statistics  of  a  Vermont  grocery- 
man  who  wanted  a  passport.  In  another  corner  sat 
Henry  White,  ex- Ambassador  in  Rome  and  Paris, 
scribbling  away  at  breakneck  pace,  in  order  that  the 
age,  complexion  and  height  of  that  trembling  Vassar 
graduate  might  be  quickly  and  accurately  inscribed  in 
an  application  for  a  Yankee  parchment.  There,  with 
the  arm  of  a  chair  as  his  desk,  was  Professor  Jere- 
miah W.  Jenks,  great  authority  on  political  economy, 


THE   AMERICANS  101 

currency  and  trusts,  patiently  extorting  the  story  of  his 
life  from  the  coroner  of  the  Minnesota  county  who  had 
been  caught  in  the  German  war  maelstrom  in  the  midst 
of  an  investigation  of  municipal  morgues.  What  a  vast 
practical  experience  of  inquests  he  might  have  reaped 
had  he  remained  in  Europe !  And  over  there,  looking  out 
on  the  Wilhelms  Platz,  with  a  window-sill  as  a  writ- 
ing-board, the  Titian-haired  belle  of  Berlin's  American 
colony,  in  daintiest  of  midsummer  frocks  and  saucy 
turbans,  who  had  never  in  years  done  anything  more 
strenuous  than  organize  a  tea-party,  was  in  harness  as 
a  volunteer  in  the  impromptu  army  of  Uncle  Sam's 
clerks,  doing  her  bit  for  her  country  and  country-folk. 
It  was  all  very  typically  and  very  delightfully  Amer- 
ican, a  composite  of  true  Democracy  in  which  one  is 
for  all,  and  all  for  one.  I  like  to  doubt  if  there  are 
any  other  people  on  earth  who  turn  in  and  help  one 
another  in  a  spirit  of  all-engulfing  national  comrade- 
ship so  readily,  so  unconventionally  and  so  good-na- 
turedly as  Americans.  That  drama  of  companionship 
in  misery  and  adaptability  to  emergency  conditions, 
which  held  the  boards  at  the  American  Embassy  in 
Berlin  during  the  first  week  of  the  Great  War,  will 
live  long  in  the  memory  of  those  who  witnessed  it  as 
one  of  the  striking  impressions  of  a  Brobdingnagian 
moment. 

Obviously  things  would  have  been  different  if  the 
crisis  had  not  found  two  real  Americans  in  command 
of  the  Embassy  in  the  persons  of  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Ger- 
ard. When  the  typical  New  Yorker  whom  President 
Wilson  sent  to  Berlin  less  than  a  year  previous  was  first 
presented  to  his  compatriots  at  a  little  function  at  which 
it  was  my  honor  to  preside,  the  man  whom  political 


102  THE   ASSAULT 

detractors  contemptuously  referred  to  as  "a  Tammany 
Judge"  made  a  "keynote  speech,"  which  he  meant  to 
be  interpreted  as  his  "policy"  in  Germany,  as  far  as 
Americans  were  concerned.  He  said:  "When  the 
time  comes  for  me  to  retire  from  Berlin,  if  you  will 
call  me  the  most  American  Ambassador  who  ever  rep- 
resented you  in  Germany,  you  can  call  me  after  that 
anything  you  please." 

Two  years — what  years — have  elapsed  since  "Jimmy" 
Gerard  made  public  avowal  of  his  conception  of  what 
United  States  diplomatic  representatives  abroad  ought 
to  be — Americans,  first,  last  and  all  the  time.  As  these 
lines  are  written  German-American  official  relations 
seem  on  the  verge  of  rupture  and  our  embassy's  re- 
maining days  in  Berlin  appear  to  be  calculable  in 
hours.  Whether  it  shall  turn  out  that  the  Arabic  insult 
was  after  all  swallowed  as  the  Lusitania  infamy  was 
stomached,  or  whether  Judge  Gerard  is  finally  recalled 
from  Berlin  as  a  protest  extracted  at  length  from  the 
most  patient,  reluctant  and  long-suffering  Government 
on  record,  he  will  richly  have  realized  his  ambition — 
to  be  "the  most  American  Ambassador"  ever  accred- 
ited to  the  German  court.  In  my  time  in  Berlin  I  knew 
four  American  ambassadors.  Each  one  was  a  credit  to 
his  nation.  But  "Jimmy"  Gerard  was  "the  most  Amer- 
ican," and  I  count  that,  in  a  citizen  of  the  United  States 
called  to  represent  his  country  abroad,  the  superlative 
quality.  The  seductive  atmosphere  of  a  Court  in 
which  adulation  was  obsequiously  practised,  especially 
toward  Americans,  never  turned  the  head  of  Judge 
Gerard  or  his  wife.  They  had  far  more  than  the 
share  of  hobnobbing  with  Royalty  which  falls  to  the 
lot  of  diplomatic  newcomers  in  Berlin.     Princes  and 


THE   AMERICANS  103 

princesses  came  with  unwonted  freedom  to  Wilhelms 
Platz  7.  They  found  the  former  Miss  Daly,  of  Ana- 
conda, Montana,  being  a  natural  young  American 
woman,  as  much  at  ease  in  their  gilded  presence  as  she 
was  the  day  before  when  presiding  over  the  tempestu- 
ous deliberations  of  the  American  Woman's  Club  out 
on  Prager  Platz. 

To  me  the  Gerards,  apart  from  their  personal  charm, 
unaffected  dignity  and  joyous  Americanism,  always 
were  psychologically  interesting  because  they  typified 
so  splendidly  that  greatest  of  our  national  traits — 
adaptability.  To  be  dropped  into  the  vortex  of  Euro- 
pean political  life,  with  its  gaping  pitfalls  and  brilliant 
opportunities  for  mistakes,  is  not  child's  play  even  for 
the  most  experienced  of  men  and  women.  France,  for 
example,  regarded  no  name  in  its  diplomatic  register 
less  eminent  than  that  of  a  Cambon  fit  to  head  its 
mission  to  Berlin.  England  kept  at  the  Hohenzollern 
court  the  most  gifted  ambassador  on  the  Foreign  Of- 
fice's active  list — Sir  Edward  Goschen.  Unthinking 
Americans,  by  which  I  mean  those  who  underestimate 
our  inherent  capacity  to  land  on  our  feet,  may  have 
had  their  misgivings  when  a  mere  Justice  of  the  Su- 
preme Court  of  the  State  of  New  York  and  the  daugh- 
ter of  a  Montana  copper  king  were  sent  to  represent 
America  among  professional  diplomats  of  the  highest 
European  rank.  But  "Jimmy"  and  "Molly"  Gerard 
made  good.  It  is  the  American  way,  and  because  it 
is  that,  it  is  their  way.  As  for  the  Ambassador,  he 
has  demonstrated,  to  my  way  of  thinking,  that  a  grad- 
uate course  in  the  university  of  American  politics  is 
ideal  training  for  diplomacy.  Intelligence,  tact,  re- 
sourcefulness and  courage,  the  rudiments  of  the  diplo- 


104  THE   ASSAULT 

matic  career,  are  qualities  which  surely  nothing  can 
develop  in  a  man  more  thoroughly  than  the  hurly- 
burly,  rough-and-tumble,  give-and-take  of  an  Amer- 
ican electioneering  campaign.  It  is  amid  its  storms 
and  tribulations  that  a  man  learns  to  be  something 
more  than  an  inhabited  dress-suit.  It  is  there  he  ac- 
quires the  art  of  being  human.  It  is  there  that  he 
comes  to  appreciate  the  priceless  value  of  loyalty. 
United  States  Presidents  do  not  err  seriously  when 
they  hunt  for  ambassadors  among  men  who  have  been 
through  the  preparatory  school  from  which  "Jimmy" 
Gerard  holds  a  magnum  cum  laude. 

My  personal  observations  of  Judge  Gerard's  ambas- 
sadorial methods  are  based  for  the  most  part  on  his 
career  before  the  war.  But  he  has  not  departed  from 
them  during  the  war.  Bismarck  laid  it  down  as  a 
maxim  that  an  ambassador  should  not  be  "too  popular" 
at  the  court  to  which  he  was  accredited.  From  all  one 
can  gather,  "Jimmy"  Gerard  has  not  laid  himself  open 
to  that  charge  in  Berlin  since  August,  1914.  Nobody 
who  knows  him  ever  suspected  for  a  moment  that  he 
would.  Toadying  is  not  in  his  lexicon,  and  aggres- 
sively pro-American  ambassadors  are  condemned  in 
advance  to  be  disliked  in  Germany.  They  do  not  fit 
into  the  Teutonic  diplomatic  scheme.  If  they  are  in- 
spired by  such  unconventional  aspirations  as  those  to 
which  Judge  Gerard  gave  utterance  in  his  "keynote 
speech"  to  the  American  Luncheon  Club  of  Berlin,  it 
is  morally  certain  that  their  usefulness — to  Germany 
— is  limited. 

The  American  Ambassador  had  been  acting  for 
Great  Britain  in  the  enemy's  country  barely  thirty-six 
hours,  when  Sir  Edward  Goschen,  Great  Britain's  re- 


Underwood  and  Underwood. 


Mrs.  Gerard. 


THE   AMERICANS  .     105 

tiring  Ambassador  in  Berlin,  in  his  official  report  on 
the  knightly  treatment  accorded  him  and  his  staff  dur- 
ing their  last  hours  on  German  soil,  wrote : 

"I  should  also  like  to  mention  the  great  assistance 
rendered  totus  all  by  my  American  colleague,  Mr.  Ger- 
ard, and  his  staff.  Undeterred  by  the  hooting  and 
hisses  with  which  he  was  often  greeted  by  the  mob  on 
entering  and  leaving  the  Embassy,  His  Excellency 
came  repeatedly  to  see  me,  to  ask  how  he  could  help 
us  and  to  make  arrangements  for  the  safety  of  stranded 
British  subjects.  He  extricated  many  of  these  from 
extremely  difficult  situations  at  some  personal  risk  to 
himself  and  his  calmness  and  savoir  faire  and  his  firm- 
ness in  dealing  with  the  Imperial  authorities  gave  full 
assurance  that  the  protection  of  British  subjects  and 
interests  could  not  have  been  left  in  more  efficient  and 
able  hands." 

Nobody  who  ever  knew  "Jimmy"  Gerard — that  is 
the  affectionate  way  in  which  old  friends  and  even 
acquaintances  of  brief  duration  almost  invariably 
speak  of  him — would  expect  him  to  be  anything  in  the 
world  except  "undeterred"  by  the  cowardly  onslaughts 
of  the  Berlin  barbarians.  An  expert  swimmer,  clever 
amateur  boxer,  crack  shot,  volunteer  soldier  and  vet- 
eran of  New  York  politics,  "Jimmy"  Gerard  never 
knew  the  meaning  of  the  word  fear,  and  the  unfailing 
courage  with  which  he  has  "stood  up"  to  the  Kaiser's 
Government  throughout  the  various  crises  of  the  war 
has  been  in  full  keeping  with  his  virile  temperament. 

It  is  sometimes  said  that  our  diplomatic  system,  or 
such  as  it  is,  reduces  American  ambassadors  and  min- 


106  THE   ASSAULT 

isters  to  the  status  of  messenger-boys,  who  have  little 
to  do  but  to  carry  back  and  forth  between  their  offices 
and  the  foreign  ministries  to  which  they  are  accredited 
the  communications  and  instructions  which  Washing- 
ton sends  them.  There  could,  of  course,  be  no  more 
obtuse  misconception.  Berlin,  the  capital  of  Macht- 
politik,  is  particularly  a  capital  in  which  everything 
depends  on  the  manner  in  which  a  foreign  Govern- 
ment's views  are  expressed  or  its  wishes  conveyed. 
It  has  not  been  my  privilege  to  be  behind  the  in- 
nocuous von  Jagow's  screen  when  "Jimmy"  Gerard 
strolled  across  the  Wilhelms  Platz  to  the  ramshackle 
old  Ausw'drtiges  Amt,  to  tell  the  German  Government 
what  Washington  thought  of  this,  that  or  the  other 
of  her  recurring  acts  of  lawlessness,  but  I  vow  that 
von  Jagow  has  got  to  know  Gerard  for  just  what  he 
is — an  American  from  the  top  of  his  extraordinarily 
well-shaped  head  to  the  soles  of  his  feet.  The  war  has 
brought  us  many  blessings.  Among  them  we  may 
count  high  the  fact  that  at  the  capital  of  the  enemy  of 
all  mankind  we  had,  ready  to  speak  up  and  to  stand 
up  for  us,  in  gladness  or  vicissitude,  a  real  man. 

No  story  of  our  Berlin  war  Embassy  would  be  com- 
plete without  a  reference  to  the  Ambassador's  lieuten- 
ants, who,  inspired  by  his  own  example  of  unruffled 
good  nature  and  limitless  patience,  capably  played 
their  own  trying  parts.  At  Judge  Gerard's  right  hand 
was  Joseph  Clark  Grew,  First  Secretary,  Harvard  '02, 
who,  having  shot  wild  beasts  in  the  jungles  of  Asia, 
would  naturally  not  quail  before  Germans,  no  matter 
how  stormy  the  conditions.  Grew  is  one  of  the  excep- 
tional young  men  in  our  diplomatic  service,  because, 


THE   AMERICANS  107 

he  has  weathered  its  snares  unspoiled.  A  distinguished 
secretarial  career  at  such  important  posts  as  Cairo, 
Mexico  City,  Vienna,  Petrograd  and  Berlin,  in  the 
course  of  which  he  frequently  acted  as  Ambassador  or 
Minister  in  charge,  has  left  him,  at  thirty-five,  as  nat- 
ural, human  and  American  as  no  doubt  many  Harvard 
men  are  while  still  beneath  the  democratizing  influence 
of  the  campus  elms.  I  mention  the  preservation  of 
these  qualities  in  Grew  because  they  have  been  known 
to  disappear  in  many  of  our  worthy  young  fellow 
countrymen,  jumped  precipitately  from  college  into 
representative  positions  abroad,  and  who  thenceforth 
refused  to  brush  shoulders  with  anything  beneath  the 
rank  of  royalty. 

In  Roland  B.  Harvey  and  Albert  Billings  Ruddock, 
respectively  Second  and  Third  Secretaries,  Judge  Ger- 
ard was  also  the  fortunate  possessor  of  a  couple  of 
adjutants  who,  in  the  presence  of  emergency,  showed 
that  hustle  and  bonhomie,  besides  being  American 
talents,  are  diplomatic  traits  of  no  mean  order.  To 
preserve  calm  during  the  passport  stampede  of  the 
first  week  of  August,  1914,  was  to  exhibit  the  finesse 
of  a  Disraeli.  Harvey  and  Ruddock  are  types  of  the 
younger  generation  of  American  diplomatists  who  go 
in  for  the  career  with  a  view  to  devoting  themselves  to 
its  serious  side  and  from  among  whom,  some  day, 
we  ought  to  evolve  a  professional  service  worthy  of 
the  name.  Neither  of  them  ever  struck  me  as  being 
afflicted  by  such  emotions  as  filled  the  breast  of  a 
certain  well-known  young  man  when  promoted  from 
a  European  first-secretaryship  to  one  of  our  important 
ministerships  in  South  America.    "Well,  old  boy,"  I 


108  THE   ASSAULT, 

asked  him,  "what  do  you  think  about  going  to ?" 

"Oh,"  he  rejoined,  "I  suppose  it's   all  right,  but  it's  a 
h —  of  a  way  from  Paris !" 

I  must  not  end  this  chapter,  which  I  hope  is  recog- 
nizable as  a  poor  expression  of  gratitude  to  all 
concerned  for  many  kindnesses  rendered,  without  a 
mention  of  the  youngest,  but  by  no  means  the  least 
meritorious  member,  of  the  Berlin  war  Embassy  fam- 
ily— Lanier  Winslow,  the  Ambassador's  ever-ebullient 
private  secretary.  War  sobered  Winslow  so  rapidly  that 
he  committed  matrimony  before  it  was  six  months  old. 
I  can  hear  him  now,  in  the  midst  of  the  passport  panic, 
still  imitating  Frank  Tinney  or  humming  Get  Out  and 
Get  Under,  just  as  Nero  might  have  done  if  Rome  had 
known  what  rag-time  was.  At  an  hour  when  it  was 
most  needed,  Lanier  Winslow  was  a  paragon  of  good 
humor,  and  altogether,  by  common  consent,  a  thing  of 
beauty  and  a  joy  forever. 


CHAPTER  IX 


AUGUST  FOURTH 


GERMANY'S  war  Juggernaut  by  the  morning;  of 
Monday,  August  3,  was  in  full,  but  incredibly 
noiseless,  motion.  I  always  knew  it  was  a  magnifi- 
cently well  greased  machine,  geared  for  the  maximum 
of  silence,  but  I  felt  sure  it  could  not  swing  into,  ac- 
tion without  some  reverberating  creaks.  Yet  Berlin 
externally  had  been  far  more  feverishly  agitated  on 
Spring  Parade  days  at  recurring  ends  of  May  than 
it  was  now,  with  "enemies  all  around"  and  that  "war 
on  two  fronts,"  which  most  Germans  used  to  talk 
about  as  something,  Gott  sei  Dank,  they  would  never 
live  to  see.  One's  male  friends  of  military  age — it 
was  now  the  second  day  of  mobilization — kept  on  melt- 
ing away  from  hour  to  hour,  but  amid  a  complete  lack 
of  fuss  and  bustle.  It  almost  seemed  as  if  the  army 
had  orders  to  rush  to  the  fighting-line  in  gum-shoes 
and  that  everything  on  wheels  had  rubber  tires.  As 
the  Fatherland  for  years  had  armed  in  silence,  so  she 
was  going  to  battle.  We  saw  no  seventeen-inch  guns 
rumbling  to  the  front.  Those  were  Germany's  best- 
concealed  weapons.  A  military  attache  of  one  of  the 
chief  belligerents,  who  lived  in  Berlin  for  four  years 
preceding  the  war,  has  since  confessed  that  he  never 
even  knew  of  the  "Big  Berthas'  "  existence ! 

Germany  girding  for  Armageddon  was  distinctly  a 
109 


110  THE   ASSAULT 

disappointment.  I  entirely  agreed  with  a  portly  dow- 
ager from  the  Middle  West,  who,  between  frettings 
about  when  she  could  get  a  train  to  the  Dutch  frontier, 
continually  expressed  her  chagrin  at  such  "a  poor  show." 
She  imagined,  like  a  good  many  of  the  rest  of  us, 
that  mobilization  in  Germany  would  at  the  very  least 
see  the  Supreme  War  Lord  bolting  madly  up  and  down 
Unter  den  Linden,  plunging  silver  spurs  into  a  foam- 
ing white  charger  and  brandishing  a  glistening  sword 
in  martial  gestures  as  Caruso  does  when  he  plays 
Radames  in  the  finale  of  the  second  act  of  Aida.  Ver- 
di's Egyptian  epic  is  the  Kaiser's  favorite  opera,  and 
he  ought  to  have  remembered,  we  thought,  how  a  con- 
quering hero  should  demean  himself  at  such  a  blood- 
stirring  hour.  At  least  Berlin,  we  hoped,  would  rise 
to  the  occasion,  and  thunder  and  rock  with  the  pomp 
and  circumstance  of  war's  alarums. 

There  was  amazingly  little  of  anything  of  that  sort. 
The  Kaiser  instead  automobiled  around  town  in  a  pro- 
saic six-cylinder  Mercedes,  as  he  long  was  wont  to  do, 
just  keeping  some  rather  important  professional  en- 
gagements with  the  Chief  of  the  General  Staff,  the  Im- 
perial Chancellor  and  the  Secretary  of  the  Navy.  As 
he  flitted  by,  the  huge  crowds  lined  up  on  the  curbstone 
stiffened  into  attitudes,  clicked  heels,  doffed  hats  and 
"hoched."  The  atmosphere  was  stimmungsv oiler  than 
usual,  for  German  phlegm  had  vanished  along  with  high 
prices  on  the  Bourse,  but  the  paroxysm  of  electric 
excitement  which  I  always  fancied  would  usher  in  a 
German  war  was  unaccountably  missing.  When  you 
mentioned  that  phenomenon  to  German  friends,  their 
bosoms  swelled  with  visible  pride.  They  were  im- 
measurably flattered  by  your  indirect  compliment  that 


AUGUST   FOURTH  111 

the  Kaiser's  war  establishment  was  so  perfect  a  mech- 
anism that  it  could  clear  for  action  almost  impercept- 
ibly. 

I  had  now  deserted  my  home  in  suburban  Wilmers- 
dorf,  which  I  nicknamed  the  "District  of  Columbia," 
for  in  and  all  around  it  Berlin's  American  colony  was 
domiciled,  and  taken  a  room  for  the  opening  scenes 
of  the  war  drama  in  the  Hotel  Adlon.  With  its  broad 
fronts  on  the  Linden  and  Pariser  Platz,  and  the 
French,  British  and  Russian  Embassies  within  a 
stone's  throw  to  the  right  and  left,  the  Adlon  was 
an  ideal  vantage  point.  If  there  were  to  be  "demon- 
strations," I  could  feel  sure,  at  so  strategic  a  point, 
of  being  in  the  thick  of  them.  Events  of  the  succeed- 
ing thirty-six  hours  were  to  show  that  I  did  not  reckon 
without  my  host  on  that  score. 

From  window  and  balcony  overlooking  the  Linden 
I  could  now  see  or  hear  at  intervals  detachments  of 
Berlin  regiments,  Uhlans  or  Infantry  of  the  Guard, 
or  a  battery  of  light  artillery,  swinging  along  to  rail- 
way stations  to  entrain  for  the  front.  Occasionally 
battalions  of  provincial  regiments,  distinguishable  be- 
cause the  men  did  not  tower  into  space  like  Berlin's 
guardsmen,  crossed  town  en  route  from  one  train  to 
another.  The  men  seemed  happier  than  I  had  ever 
before  seen  German  soldiers.  That  was  the  only  dif- 
ference, or  at  least  the  principal  one.  The  prospect 
of  soon  becoming  cannon-fodder  was  evidently  far 
from  depressing.  Most  of  them  carried  flowers  en- 
twined round  the  rifle  barrel  or  protruding  from  its 
mouth.  Here  and  there  a  bouquet  dangled  rakishly 
from  a  helmet.  Now  and  then  a  flaxen-haired  Prus- 
sian girl  would  step  into  the  street  and  press  a  posey 


112  THE   ASSAULT 

into  some  trooper's  grimy  hand.  Yet,  except  for  the 
fact  that  the  soldiers  were  all  in  field  gray,  (I  wonder 
when  the  Kaiser's  military  tailors  began  making  those 
millions  of  gray  uniforms!)  with  even  their  familiar 
spiked  headpiece  masked  in  canvas  of  the  same 
hue,  the  Kaiser's  fighting  men  marching  off  to 
battle  might  have  been  carrying  out  a  workaday 
route-march.  Then,  suddenly,  a  company  or  a  whole 
battalion  would  break  into  song,  and  the  crowd,  trail- 
ing alongside  the  bass-drum  of  the  band,  just  as  in 
peace  times,  would  take  up  the  refrain,  and  presently 
half-a-mile  of  Unter  den  Linden  was  echoing  with 
Deutschland,  Deutschland  iiber  Alles,  and  I  knew  that 
the  Fatherland  was  at  war. 

At  the  railway  stations  of  Berlin  and  countless  other 
German  towns  and  cities  at  that  hour  heart-rending 
little  tragedies  were  being  enacted,  as  fathers,  mothers, 
wives,  sisters  and  sweethearts  bade  a  long  farewell  to 
the  beloved  in  gray.  Only  rarely  did  some  man  in 
uniform  himself  surrender  to  the  emotions  of  the  mo- 
ment. These  swarthy  young  Germans,  with  fifty  or 
sixty  pounds  of  impedimenta  strapped  round  them, 
were  endowed  with  Spartan  stolidity  now,  and  smil- 
ingly buoyed  up  the  drooping  spirits  of  the  kith  and 
kin  they  were  leaving  behind.  "Es  wird  schon  gut, 
Miitterchen!  Es  wird  schon  gut!"  (It  will  be  all 
right,  mother  dear !  It  will  be  all  right!)  Thus  they 
returned  comfort  for  tears.  "Nicht  unterliegen!  Bes- 
ser  nicht  zuruckkehren!"  (Don't  be  beaten!  Better 
not  come  back  at  all !)  was  the  good-by  greeting  blown 
with  the  final  kisses  as  many  a  trainload  of  embryonic 
heroes  faded  slowly  from  sight  beneath  the  station's 
gaping  archway.    Germany  was  now  indubitably  con- 


AUGUST   FOURTH  113 

vinced  that  its  war  was  war  in  a  holy  cause.  The 
time  had  come  for  the  Fatherland  to  rise  to  the  ma- 
jesty of  a  great  hour.  "Auf  wiedersehen!"  sang  the 
country  to  the  army.  But  if  there  was  to  be  no  re- 
union, the  army  must  go  down  fighting  to  the  last 
gasp  for  unsere  gerechte  Sache,  manfully,  tirelessly, 
ruthlessly,  till  victory  was  enforced.  Such  were  the 
inspiring  thoughts  amid  which  the  boys  in  field  gray 
trooped  off  to  die  for  Kaiser  and  Empire. 

The  outstanding  event  of  August  3  was  the  publi- 
cation of  the  German  Government's  famous  apologia 
for  the  war,  the  so-called  "White  Paper"  officially  de- 
scribed as  "Memorandum  and  Documents  in  Relation 
to  the  Outbreak  of  the  War."  Early  in  the  afternoon 
a  telephone  message  arrived  for  me  at  the  Adlon  to 
the  effect  that  if  I  would  call  at  the  Press  Bureau  of  the 
Foreign  Office  at  five  o'clock,  Legationsrat  Heilbron, 
one  of  Hammann's  lieutenants  whom  I  had  known  for 
many  years,  would  be  glad  to  deliver  me  an  advance 
copy  for  special  transmission  to  London  and  New 
York.  I  lay  great  stress  on  the  fact  that  up  to  sun- 
down of  August  3,  1914,  I  continued  to  be  persona 
gratissima  with  the  Imperial  German  Government.  It 
was  true  that  one  of  the  young  Foreign  Office  cubs 
told  off  to  censor  press  cablegrams  at  the  Main  Tele- 
graph Office  had,  during  the  preceding  three  days,  ex- 
pressed annoyance  with  what  he  considered  my 
eagerness  to  "go  into  details,"  but  Legationsrat  Heil- 
bron's  invitation  to  fetch  the  "White  Paper"  was  grati- 
fying evidence  that  my  relations  with  the  powers-that- 
be  were  still  "correct,"  even  if  not  cordial.  I  was 
glad  of  that,  because  there  was  constantly  in  my  mind 
the  desire  to  remain  in  Germany,  whatever  happened, 


114  THE   ASSAULT 

with  a  front-row  seat  for  the  big  show.  At  the  ap- 
pointed hour  I  presented  myself  in  Herr  Heilbron's 
room  on  the  ground  floor  of  the  Wilhelmstrasse  front 
of  the  Foreign  Office.  He  greeted  me  with  old-time 
courtesy,  though  I  found  his  demeanor  perceptibly  de- 
pressed. He  handed  me  a  copy  of  the  Denkschrift, 
and,  when  I  begged  him  for  a  second  one,  he  complied 
with  a  gracious  bitte  sehr. 

A  London  colleague  had  already  intimated  to  me 
that  the  Imperial  Chancellor,  desiring  to  place  the  Ger- 
man case  promptly  and  fully  before  the  British  and 
American  publics,  would  "do  his  best"  with  the  mili- 
tary authorities  who  were  now  in  supreme  control  of 
the  postal  telegraph  and  cable  lines  to  induce  them  to 
allow  London  and  New  York  correspondents  to  file 
exhaustive  "stories"  on  the  White  Paper.  As  I  was 
sure,  however,  that  Reuter's  Agency  for  England  and 
the  Associated  Press  for  America  would  be  handling 
the  affair  at  great  length,  my  treatment  of  it  was  con- 
fined, as  was  usual  under  such  circumstances,  to  tele- 
graphing a  brief  introductory  summary. 

What  struck  me  instantly  as  the  hall-marks  of  the 
German  publication  were  its  treatment  of  the  war  as 
an  exclusively  Russian-provoked  Russo-German  affair 
and  its  brazenly  ex-parte  character — how  ex-parte  I 
did  not  fully  realize  till  I  read  England's  White  Pa- 
per a  week  later.  Sir  Edward  Grey  laid  his  cards  on 
the  table,  without  marginal  notes  or  comment  of  any 
kind,  and  asked  the  world  to  pass  judgment.  Doctor 
von  Bethmann  Hollweg's  White  Paper  began  with  a 
lengthy  plea  of  justification  and  ended  with  quotation 
of  such  communications  between  the  Kaiser's  Govern- 
ment and  its  ambassadors  and  between  the  German 


AUGUST    FOURTH  115 

Emperor  and  the  Czar  as  would  most  plausibly  sup- 
port the  Fatherland's  case  for  war.  It  was  manifestly 
a  biased  and  incomplete  record.  It  was  in  fact  a  doc- 
tored record,  and  suggested  that  its  authors  had  Bis- 
marck's mutilation  of  the  Ems  telegram  in  mind  as  a 
precedent,  in  emulation  of  which  no  German  Govern- 
ment could  possibly  go  wrong. 

Although  compiled  to  include  events  up  to  August 
1,  the  German  White  Paper  was  silent  as  the  grave 
in  regard  to  Belgium  and  the  negotiations  with  the 
Government  of  Great  Britain.  Issued  on  the  night  of 
August  3,  when  hundreds  of  thousands  of  German 
troops  were  waiting  at  Aix-la-Chapelle  for  the  great 
assault  on  Liege — if,  indeed,  at  that  hour  they  were 
not  already  across  the  Belgian  frontier — this  sacred 
brief  designed  to  establish  the  Fatherland's  case  at  the 
bar  of  world  opinion  had  no  single  word  to  say  on 
what  was  destined  to  be  almost  the  supreme  issue  of 
the  war.  It  was  the  last  word  in  Imperial  German 
deception.  If  the  German  public  had  known  that  Sir 
Edward  Grey  on  July  30  had  already  "warned  Prince 
Lichnowsky  that  Germany  must  not  count  upon  our 
standing  aside  in  all  circumstances,"  I  imagine  its  bit- 
terness a  few  nights  later,  when  the  fable  of  England's 
"treacherous  intervention"  was  sprung  upon  the  de- 
luded Fatherland,  might  have  been  less  barbaric  in  its 
intensity. 

Next  to  the  omission  of  all  reference  to  what  Sir 
.Edward  Grey  called  Germany's  "infamous  proposal" 
for  the  purchase  of  British  neutrality — a  pledge  not 
to  despoil  France  of  European  territory  if  England 
would  stand  with  folded  arms  while  Germany  violated 
Belgium  and  ravished  the  French  Colonial  Empire — 


116  THE   ASSAULT 

the  striking  feature  of  the  Berlin  White  Paper  was  the 
admission  of  German- Austrian  complicity  in  the  hu- 
miliation of  Serbia.  The  Foreign  Office,  as  I  have 
previously  explained,  had  zealously  affirmed  Germany's 
entire  detachment  from  Austria's  programme  for 
avenging  Serajevo.  What  did  the  White  Paper  now 
tell  us?    That 

"Austria  had  to  admit  that  it  would  not  be  consist- 
ent either  with  the  dignity  or  the  self-preservation  of 
the  Monarchy  to  look  on  longer  at  the  operations  on 
the  other  side  of  the  border  without  taking  action. 
.  .  .  We  were  able  to  assure  our  ally  most  heartily 
of  our  agreement  with  her  view  of  the  situation,  and 
to  assure  her  that  any  action  she  might  consider  it 
necessary  to  take  in  order  to  put  an  end  to  the  move- 
ment in  Servia  directed  against  the  existence  of  the 
Austro-Hungarian  Monarchy  would  receive  our  ap- 
proval. We  were  fully  aware,  in  this  connection,  that 
warlike  moves  on  the  part  of  Austria-Hungary  against 
Servia  would  bring  Russia  into  the  question,  and 
might  draw  us  into  a  war  in  accordance  with  our  du- 
ties as  an  ally." 

The  historic  and  ineffaceable  fact  is  that  Austria— - 
wabbly,  invertebrate  Austria,  which  would  even  to-day, 
but  for  Germany,  lay  prostrate  and  vanquished — never 
made  a  solitary  move  in  the  whole  plot  to  coerce  Ser- 
bia without  the  full  concurrence  of  the  big  brother  at 
Berlin.  It  would  be  an  insult  to  the  intelligence  of 
German  diplomacy,  stupid  as  it  is,  to  imagine  that  the 
Kaiser's  Government  sat  mute,  unconsulted  and  non- 
chalant, while  Austria  worked  out  a  scheme  certain, 


AUGUST   FOURTH  117 

as  the  Germans  themselves  admit  in  their  White  Paper, 
to  plunge  Europe  into  war. 

It  was  my  privilege  on  arriving  in  the  United  States 
on  August  22,  to  furnish  the  New  York  Times  with 
the  first  copy  of  the  German  White  Paper  to  reach  the 
American  public.  In  preparing  a  prefatory  note  to 
accompany  the  verbatim  translation  published  in  next 
day's  paper,  I  selected  the  paragraph  above  quoted  as 
primd-facie  evidence  that  the  German  claim  of  non- 
collusion  with  Austria  is  subterfuge — to  give  it  the 
longer  and  less  unparliamentary  term. 

The  German  White  Paper  was  prepared  formally 
for  the  information  of  the  Reichstag,  which  was  sum- 
moned to  meet  on  Tuesday,  August  4  of  imperishable 
memory,  for  the  purpose  of  voting  $325,000,000  of 
initial  war  credits.  Paris  was  not  won  in  the  expected 
six  weeks,  and  the  Reichstag  has  voted  $7,500,000,000 
of  war  credits  up  to  this  writing  (September  1,  1915), 
with  melancholy  promise  of  still  more  to  come.  The 
twenty-four  hours  preceding  the  war  sitting  had  not 
been  eventless.  Monsieur  Sverbieff  and  the  staff  of 
the  Russian  Embassy  were  the  victims  of  gross  insults 
from  the  mob  in  Unter  den  Linden,  as  they  left  their 
headquarters  in  automobiles  for  the  railway  station. 
Mounted  police  were  present  to  "keep  order,"  but  their 
"vigilance"  did  not  deter  German  men  and  youths  from 
spitting  in  the  faces  of  the  Czar's  representatives,  be- 
laboring them  with  walking-sticks  and  umbrellas,  and 
offering  rowdy  indignities  to  the  women  of  the  am- 
bassadorial party.  In  front  of  the  French  Embassy 
menacing  crowds  stood  throughout  the  day  and  night, 
waiting  for  a  chance  to  exhibit  German  patriotism  at 


118  THE   ASSAULT 

Monsieur  Cambon's  expense.  When  Sefior  Pole  de 
Bernabe,  the  Spanish  Ambassador,  who  was  calling  to 
arrange  to  take  over  the  representation  of  France  dur- 
ing the  war,  made  his  appearance,  the  mob  mistook  him 
for  Cambon  and  was  just  prevented  in  the  nick  of  time 
from  assaulting  the  Spaniard.  How  the  French  Em- 
bassy finally  got  away  from  Germany,  under  circum- 
stances which  would  have  shamed  a  Fiji  Island  gov- 
ernment, was  later  related  for  the  benefit  of  posterity 
in  the  French  Yellow  Book.  When  I  read  it  months 
later,  I  remembered  my  first  German  teacher  in  Ber- 
lin, a  noblewoman,  once  telling  me,  when  I  asked  her 
how  to  say  "gentleman"  in  German :  "There  is  no  such 
thing  as  a  'gentleman'  in  the  German  language."  That 
was  paraphrased  to  me  by  another  German  on  a  later 
occasion,  when,  discussing  the  ability  of  German  sci- 
ence, so  well  demonstrated  during  this  war,  to  devise 
a  substitute  for  almost  anything,  he  remarked :  "The 
only  thing  we  can't  make  is  a  gentleman,  because  we 
never  had  a  proper  analysis  of  the  necessary  ingredi- 
ents." The  Germans,  in  their  communicative  mo- 
ments, always  used  to  acknowledge  that  Bismarck  was 
right  when  he  called  them  "a  nation  of  house-ser- 
vants." It  is  impressively  exemplified  on  their  stage, 
which  boasts  the  finest  character  actors  imaginable; 
but  when  a  German  player  essays  to  portray  the  gen- 
tleman, he  is  grotesque.  He  gropes  helplessly  in  a 
strange  and  unexplored  realm. 

On  the  day  before  the  war  session  of  the  Reichstag, 
the  Kaiser,  more  conscious  than  ever  now  of  his  partner- 
ship with  Deity,  ordained  Wednesday,  August  5,  as 
a  day  of  universal  prayer  for  the  success  of  German 
arms.    Soon  after  its  proclamation,  William  II,  thun- 


AUGUST    FOURTH  119 

iderously  acclaimed,  appeared  in  Unter  den  Linden  in- 
termittently, en  route  to  conference  with  high  officers 
of  state.  He  was  clad,  like  every  German  soldier  one 
now  saw,  in  field-gray,  and  ready,  one  heard,  to  leave 
for  the  front  at  a  moment's  notice,  to  take  up  his  post, 
assigned  him  by  Hohenzollern  warrior  traditions,  on 
the  battlefield  in  the  midst  of  his  loyal  legions.  Mo- 
bilization was  now  in  full  swing,  and  more  and  more 
troops  were  in  evidence,  crossing  town  to  railway  sta- 
tions from  which  they  were  to  be  transported  east  or 
west,  as  the  Staff's  emergencies  required.  A  week  be- 
fore, all  these  soldiers  were  in  Prussian  blue.  They 
were  gray  now,  from  head  to  foot,  millions  of  them. 
Obviously  the  clothing  department  of  the  army  had 
not  been  taken  by  "surprise"  by  the  cruel  war  "forced" 
on  pacific  Germany.  Three  million  uniforms  can  not 
be  turned  out  in  a  whole  summer — even  in  Germany. 
I  thought  of  this,  as  gray  streams,  far  into  the  evening, 
kept  pouring  through  Berlin,  and  I  thought  what  a 
marvelously  happy  selection  that  peculiar  shade  of 
drab-gray,  of  almost  dust-like  invisibility  from  afar, 
was  for  field  purposes.  To  shoot  at  lines  no  more 
colorful  than  that,  it  seemed  to  me,  would  be  like  bang- 
ing away  at  the  horizon  itself.     .     .     . 

History,  I  suppose,  will  date  Armageddon  from  Au- 
gust 1,  when  the  German  army  and  navy  were  mo- 
bilized, or  perhaps  from  August  2,  when  Germany 
claims  that  Russia  and  France  fired  the  first  miscreant 
shots.  But  the  red-letter  day  of  the  World  Massacre's 
opening  week  was  beyond  all  question  Tuesday,  Au- 
gust 4,  which  began  with  the  war  sitting  of  the  Reichs- 
tag and  ended  with  England's  declaration  of  war  on 
Germany.     It  was  destined  to  be  especially  big  with 


120  THE   ASSAULT 

import  for  me — of  vital  import,  as  events  hanging  over 
my  unsuspecting  head  were  speedily  to  reveal. 

At  midday,  two  hours  before  the  session  of  the 
Reichstag  in  its  own  chamber,  Parliament  was 
"opened"  by  the  Kaiser  personally  in  the  celebrated 
White  Hall  of  the  Royal  Castle.  I  had  applied  for 
admission  after  the  few  available  press  tickets  were 
already  exhausted,  but  it  was  not  difficult  for  me  to 
visualize  the  scene.  I  had  been  in  the  White  Hall 
on  several  memorable  occasions  in  the  past — during 
the  visit  of  King  Edward  VII  in  February,  1909,  at 
a  brilliant  State  banquet  and  at  the  ball  which  fol- 
lowed ;  at  the  wedding  of  the  Emperor's  daughter,  "the 
sunshine  of  my  House,"  Princess  Victoria  Luise,  and 
Duke  Ernest  August  of  Brunswick,  in  May,  1913; 
and  a  month  later  during  the  Silver  Jubilee  celebration 
of  the  Kaiser's  reign,  when  our  own  Mr.  Carnegie 
showered  plaudits  on  the  Prince  of  the  world's  peace. 
Tower,  of  The  World  and  Daily  News,  was  lucky 
enough  to  secure  a  ticket  to  the  Castle  ceremonial,  and 
he  was  bubbling  over  with  excitement  at  having  been 
privileged  to  participate  in  so  memorable  a  function. 
My  old  friend,  Giinther  Thomas,  late  of  the  New- 
yorker-Staatszeitung,  now  joyous  in  the  prospect  of 
joining  the  German  Press  Bureau's  war  staff,  came 
back  from  the  Castle  almost  pitying  me  for  not  hav- 
ing been  there.  "Wile,  I  tell  you,"  I  can  hear  him 
saying  now,  "it  was  beautiful,  simply  beautiful!  You 
missed  it !  It  was  enough  to  make  one  cry !"  Thomas 
lived  in  New  York  seventeen  years,  but  he  returned 
to  Germany  a  more  devout  Prussian  than  ever,  as  a 
man  ought  to  be  whose  father  fell  gloriously  at 
Koniggratz. 


AUGUST   FOURTH  121 

The  description  furnished  by  my  English  and  Prus- 
sian colleagues  evidently  did  not  exaggerate  the  splen- 
dor and  impressiveness  of  the  scene  at  the  White  Hall. 
The  Kaiser,  in  field-general's  gray,  entered,  escorting 
the  Empress.  He  was  solemn,  but  not  anxious-look- 
ing. Around  the  marble-pillared  chamber,  where  only 
fifteen  months  before  I  had  seen  the  Czar  and  George 
V  of  England  tripping  the  minuet  with  German  prin- 
cesses as  the  Kaiser's  honored  guests,  were  grouped 
the  first  men  of  the  Empire.  In  the  places  of  distinc- 
tion, closest  to  the  canopied  throne,  each  according  to 
his  Court  rank,  stood  the  Imperial  Chancellor,  General 
von  Moltke,  Grand-Admiral  von  Tirpitz  and  a  score 
of  other  eminent  officers  of  the  civil,  naval  and  mili- 
tary governments.  Among  the  foreign  ambassadors 
only  the  representatives  of  Russia  and  France  were 
missing  from  their  old-time  places.  Mr.  Gerard,  mod- 
est and  retiring  as  always,  amid  the  glitter  of  gold 
lace  and  brass  buttons  flashing  on  all  sides,  cut  a  more 
than  ever  self-effacing  figure  in  his  diplomatic  uni- 
form— the  plain  evening  dress  of  an  American  gen- 
tleman. 

The  Kaiser  read  his  War  Speech,  which  he  held  in 
his  right  hand,  while  the  left  firmly  gripped  his  sword- 
hilt.  Beginning  in  a  quiet  tone,  His  Majesty's  voice 
appreciably  rose  in  intensity  and  volume  as  he  ap- 
proached the  kernel  of  his  message  which  told  how 
"with  a  heavy  heart  I  have  been  compelled  to  mobilize 
my  army  against  a  neighbor  with  whom  it  has  fought 
side  by  side  on  so  many  fields  of  battle."  The  Imperial 
Russian  Government,  William  II  went  on  to  say, 
"yielding  to  the  pressure  of  an  insatiable  nationalism, 
has  taken  sides  with  a  State  which  by  encouraging 


122  THE   ASSAULT 

criminal  attacks  has  brought  on  the  evil  of  war."  That 
France,  also,  the  Kaiser  continued,  "placed  herself  on 
the  side  of  our  enemies  could  not  surprise  us.  Too 
often  have  our  efforts  to  arrive  at  friendlier  relations 
with  the  French  Republic  come  in  collision  with  old 
hopes  and  ancient  malice."  And  when  the  Kaiser  had 
ended,  with  an  invitation  to  "the  leaders  of  the  differ- 
ent parties  of  the  Reichstag"  (there  were  no  Socialists 
present)  "to  come  forward  and  lay  their  hands  in  mine 
as  a  pledge,"  the  White  Hall  reverberated  with  ap- 
plause which  must  have  seemed  almost  indecorous  in 
so  august  an  apartment,  but  which,  no  doubt,  rang 
true.  It  was  then,  I  suppose,  that  Thomas  felt  like 
weeping,  and  so  should  I,  perhaps,  had  I  been  there. 
The  Kaiser,  his  handshaking-bee  over,  strode  from  the 
scene  amid  an  awesome  silence,  and  the  statesmen,  the 
generals  and  the  admirals  went  their  respective  ways. 
All  was  now  in  readiness  for  the  real  Reichstag  ses- 
sion, in  which  words  of  deathless  significance  were 
to  fall  from  the  Chancellor's  lips. 

We  were  accustomed  to  sardine-box  conditions  in 
the  always  overcrowded  press  gallery  of  the  Reichstag 
on  "great  days,"  but  to-day  we  were  piled  on  top  of 
one  another  in  closer  formation  even  than  a  Prussian 
infantry  platoon  in  the  charge.  Familiar  faces  were 
missing.  Comert,  of  Le  Temps,  Caro,  of  Le  Matin, 
and  Bonnefon,  of  Le  Figaro,  were  not  there.  They 
had  escaped,  we  were  glad  to  hear,  by  one  of  the  very 
last  trains  across  the  French  frontier.  Lowenton  (a 
brother  of  Madame  Nazimoff),  Grossmann,  Markoff 
and  Melnikoff,  our  long-time  Russian  colleagues,  were 
absent,  too.  Had  they  gained  Wirballen  in  time,  we 
wondered,   or   were   they  languishing   in   Spandau? 


AUGUST    FOURTH  123 

Doctor  Paul  Goldmann,  doyen  of  our  Berlin  corps, 
was  in  his  accustomed  seat,  beaming  consciously,  as 
became,  at  such  an  hour,  the  correspondent-in-chief  of 
the  great  allied  Vienna  Neue  Freie  Presse.  The  Brit- 
ish and  American  contingents  were  on  hand  in  force. 
Never  had  we  waited  for  a  Kanzlerrede  in  such  electric 
expectancy.  "Copy"  in  plenty,  such  as  none  of  us  had 
ever  telegraphed  before,  was  about  to  be  made.  Gold- 
mann, a  Foreign  Office  favorite,  as  well  as  the  all- 
around  most  popular  foreign  journalist  in  Berlin,  may 
have  had  an  advance  hint  what  was  coming,  as  he 
frequently  did,  but  to  the  vast  majority  of  us — Brit- 
ish, American,  Swedish,  Dutch,  Italian,  Swiss,  Span- 
ish and  Danish,  sandwiched  there  in  the  Pressloge  so 
closely  that  we  could  hear,  but  not  move — I  am  certain 
that  the  momentous  words  and  extraordinary  scenes 
about  to  ensue  came  as  a  staggering  revelation. 

Doctor  von  Bethmann  Hollweg,  who  is  flattered 
when  told  that  he  looks  like  Abraham  Lincoln — the  re- 
semblance ends  there — began  speaking  at  three-fifteen 
o'clock.  Gaunt  and  fatigued,  he  tugged  nervously  at 
the  portfolio  of  documents  on  the  desk  in  front  of  him 
during  the  brief  introductory  remarks  of  the  President 
of  the  House,  the  patriarchal,  white-bearded  Doctor 
Kaempf.  The  Chancellor's  manner  gave  no  indication 
that  before  he  resumed  his  seat  he  would  rise  to 
heights  of  oratorical  fire  of  which  no  one  ever  thought 
that  "incarnation  of  passionate  doctrinarianism"  capa- 
ble. What  he  said  is  known  to  all  the  world  now; 
how,  in  Bismarckian  accents,  he  thundered  that  "we 
are  in  a  state  of  self-defense  and  necessity  knows  no 
law !"  How  he  confessed  that  "our  troops,  which  have 
already  occupied  Luxemburg,  may  perhaps  already 


124  JHE    ASSAULT 

have  set  foot  on  Belgian  territory."  How  he  ac- 
knowledged, in  a  succeeding  phrase,  to  Germany's 
eternal  guilt,  that  "that  violates  international  law." 
How  he  proclaimed  the  amazing  doctrine  that,  con- 
fronted by  such  emergencies  as  Germany  now  was, 
she  had  but  one  duty — "to  hack  her  way  through,  even 
though — I  say  it  quite  frankly — we  are  doing  wrong !" 
Our  heads,  I  think,  fairly  swam  as  the  terrible  por- 
tent of  these  words  sank  into  our  consciousness.  "Our 
troops  may  perhaps  already  have  set  foot  on  Belgian 
soil."  That  meant  one  thing,  with  absolute  certainty. 
It  denoted  war  with  England.  Trifles  have  a  habit  at 
such  moments  of  lodging  themselves  firmly  in  one's 
mind;  and  I  remember  distinctly  how,  when  I  heard 
Bethmann  Hollweg  fling  that  challenge  forth,  I  leaned 
over  impulsively  to  my  Swedish  friend,  Siosteen,  of 
the  Goteborg  Tidningen,  and  whispered :  "That  settles 
it.  England's  in  it  now,  too."  Siosteen  nods  an 
excited  assent.  It  is  in  the  midst  of  one  of  the 
frequent  intervals  in  which  the  House,  floor  and  gal- 
leries alike,  is  now  venting  its  impassioned  approval 
of  the  Chancellor's  words.  I  had  heard  Biilow  and 
Bebel  and  Bethmann  Hollweg  himself,  times  innumer- 
able, set  the  Reichstag  rocking  with  fervid  demonstra- 
tions of  approval  or  hostility,  but  never  has  it  throbbed 
with  such  life  as  to-day.  It  is  the  incarnation  of  the 
inflamed  war  spirit  of  the  land.  The  more  defiant  the 
Chancellor's  diction,  the  more  fervid  the  applause  it 
evokes.  "Sehr  richtig!  Sehr  richtig!"  the  House 
shrieks  back  at  him  in  chorus  as  he  details,  step  b^ 
step,  how  Germany  has  been  "forced"  to  draw  her 
terrible  sword  to  beat  back  the  "Russian  mobilization 
menace,"  how  she  has  tried  and  failed  to  bargain  with 


AUGUST   FOURTH  125 

England  and  Belgium,  how  she  has  kept  the  dogs  of 
war  chained  to  the  last,  and  only  released  them  now 
when  destruction,  imminent  and  certain,  is  upon  her. 

All  eyes  in  the  Press  Gallery  are  riveted  on  the 
broad  left  arc  of  the  floor  usurped  by  the  one  hundred 
and  eleven  Social  Democratic  deputies  of  the  House 
of  three  hundred  and  ninety-seven  members.  For 
the  first  time  in  German  history  their  cheers  are  min- 
gling with  those  of  other  parties  in  support  of  a  Gov- 
ernment policy.  That,  after  the  Belgian  revelation, 
is  beyond  all  question  the  dominating  feature  of  a 
scene  tremendous  with  meaning  in  countless  respects. 
There  is  nothing  perfunctory  about  the  "Reds'  "  en- 
thusiasm; that  is  plain.  It  is  real,  spontaneous,  uni- 
versal. No  man  of  them  keeps  his  seat.  All  are  on 
their  feet,  succumbing  to  the  engulfing  magnitude 
of  the  moment.  That,  it  instantly  occurs  to  us,  means 
much  to  Germany  at  such  an  hour.  It  means  that 
the  hope  which  more  than  one  of  the  Fatherland's 
prospective  foes  in  years  gone  by  has  fondly  cher- 
ished, of  Socialist  revolt  in  the  hour  of  Germany's 
peril,  was  illusory  hope.  The  Chancellor  knows  what 
it  means.  "Our  army  is  in  the  field!"  he  declares, 
trembling  with  emotion.  "Our  fleet  is  ready  for  bat- 
tle !  The  whole  German  nation  stands  behind  them !" 
As  one  man,  the  entire  Reichstag  now  rises,  shouting 
its  approval  of  these  historic  words  in  tones  of  fren- 
zied exaltation.  For  two  full  minutes  pandemonium 
reigns  unchecked.  Bethmann  Hollweg  is  turning  to 
the  Social  Democrats.  His  fist  is  clenched  and  he 
brandishes  it  in  their  direction — not  in  anger  this  time, 
but  in  triumph — and,  as  if  he  were  proclaiming  the 
proud  sentiment  for  all  the  world  to  hear,  he  exclaims, 


126  THE   ASSAULT 

at  the  top  of  his  voice,  "Yea,  the  whole  nation !"  Thus 
was  Armageddon  born.  Germany,  all  present  knew, 
would  be  at  war  before  another  sun  had  gone  down, 
not  only  with  Russia  and  France,  but  with  England, 
and,  of  course,  with  Belgium,  too. 

"Supposing  the  Belgians  resist?"  I  asked  Schmidt, 
of  the  B.  Z.  am  Mittag,  a  German  colleague  whom  I 
once  chistened  Berlin's  "star"  reporter,  as  we  wan- 
dered, thinking  hard,  back  to  Unter  den  Linden. 

"Resist?"  he  replied,  half  pitying  the  feeble-minded- 
ness  which  prompted  such  a  question.  "We  shall  sim- 
ply spill  them  into  the  ocean." 


CHAPTER  X 

THE  WAR  REACHES  ME 

"TT7E  are  not  barbarians,  my  dear  Wile!"  ex- 
V  V  claimed  Giinther  Thomas,  when  we  met  in  the 
Adlon  after  the  Reichstag  sitting,  in  reply  to  my  query 
about  the  safety  of  correspondents  of  English  newspa- 
pers, now  that  Germany  was  about  to  annex  Great 
Britain  as  an  enemy  in.  addition  to  Russia  and  France. 
I  had  found  Thomas  during  ten  years. of  acquaintance 
the  best-informed  German  journalist  I  ever  knew.  His 
long  residence  in  Park  Row  had  grafted  a  "news  nose" 
on  him,  which,  coupled  with  a  profound  knowledge 
of  the  history  and  present-day  undercurrents  of  his 
own  country,  made  him  an  ideal  and  valuable  col- 
league. I  treasure  my  relations  with  him  in  grateful 
recollection.  One  required  occasionally  to  dilute  both 
his  news  and  views  with  a  strong  solution  of  skepti- 
cism, for  Thomas  was  both  a  Prussian  patriot  and  rep- 
resentative of  Mr.  Ridder's  New-Yorker  Staatszei- 
tung.  But  nine  times  out  of  ten  his  counsel  and  infor- 
mation were  like  Caesar's  wife.  His  assurance  to  me 
on  the  evening  of  August  4,  1914,  that  his  countrymen 
"were  not  barbarians"  was  the  most  misleading  piece 
of  news  he  ever  supplied  me. 

The  imminence  of  hostilities  with  England  revived 
irresistibly  in  my  mind  the  qualms  which  had  filled  the 
Germans   for  a  week  previous  on  this  very  point. 

127 


128  THE   ASSAULT 

"What  will  the  English  do?"  was  the  question  they 
constantly  flung  at  any  one  they  thought  likely  to  be 
able  to  answer  it  intelligently.  It  was  the  thing  which 
gave  themselves  the  most  anxious  heart-searching. 
The  "war  on  two  fronts,"  the  purely  Continental  af- 
fair with  the  Dual  Alliance,  filled  the  average  German 
with  no  concern.  The  Kaiser's  military  machine  had 
been  constructed  to  deal  with  France  and  Russia  com- 
bined, and  no  German  ever  for  a  moment  doubted  its 
ability  to  do  so.  Events  of  the  past  year,  I  think  it 
may  fairly  be  said,  have  justified  that  confidence,  for 
I  suppose  no  expert  anywhere  in  the  world  doubts 
but  that  for  the  presence  of  British  sea  power  on 
France  and  Russia's  side,  the  German  eagle  would  in 
all  probability  now  be  screaming  in  triumph  over 
Paris  and  Petrograd.  But  with  the  British  "in,"  doz- 
ens of  Germans  confessed,  as  my  own  ears  can  bear 
testimony,  their  case  was  "hopeless."  Few  of  them 
were  persuaded  that  Germany  could,  in  Bismarck's  pic- 
turesque phrase,  "deal  with  the  British  Navy  in  Paris." 
While  the  prospect  of  having  to  fight  France  and 
Russia  did  not  disturb  the  Germans,  the  possibility  of 
having  to  battle  with  Britain  simultaneously  filled 
them  with  undisguised  alarm.  They  would  not  admit 
it  now,  but  in  the  fading  hours  of  July,  1914,  and  the 
opening  days  of  August,  it  was  a  nightmare  which 
pressed  down  so  heavily  upon  their  consciousness  that 
they  never  spoke  of  it  except  in  accents  of  dread.  The 
Hate  cult  had  not  yet  toppled  their  reason.  Lissauer's 
demoniacal  ballad  was  still  unwritten.  In  those  an- 
guished moments  they  talked  of  England,  when  not  in 
terms  of  outright  fear,  as  the  "brother  nation"  of 
kindred  blood  and  ideals  with  whom  war  was  unthink- 


THE   WAR    REACHES    ME  129 

able  because  it  would  be  nothing  short  of  "civil  war." 
Doctor  Hecksher,  a  well-known  National  Liberal 
member  of  the  Reichstag  and  Stimmungsmacher 
(henchman)  of  the  Foreign  Office,  busily  assured 
English  newspaper  correspondents  of  the  "horror" 
with  which  the  mere  idea  of  conflict  with  England 
filled  the  German  soul.  I  thought  it  queer  that  one  of 
my  last  dispatches  to  London,  before  Anglo-German 
telegraphic  communication  snapped,  containing  Doctor 
Hecksher's  views  and  mentioning  him  by  name,  was 
ruthlessly  censored  in  Berlin  and  returned  to  me  as 
untransmissible.  That  meant  one  of  two  things — that 
Doctor  Hecksher  was  wrong  in  attributing  to  Ger- 
many overweening  desires  of  peace  with  England,  or 
that  it  was  unwise  to  let  me  indicate  that  Teuton  knees 
were  quaking  at  the  prospect  of  war  with  her.  Cer- 
tainly lachrymose  expressions  of  hope  that  England 
would  not  feel  called  upon  to  "intervene"  in  Germany's 
"just  quarrel"  with  her  neighbors  were  common  to  the 
point  of  universality  in  Berlin  on  the  eve  of  the  clash. 
They  were  born  of  inherent  conviction  that  German 
aspirations  of  imposing  Hohenzollern  hegemony  on 
the  Continent  must  and  would  be  wrecked  by  Eng- 
land's adherence  to  her  century-old  policy  of  opposing 
so  vital  a  disturbance  in  the  balance  of  European 
power. 

Uppermost  in  my  mind  just  now  was  how  to  trans- 
mit at  least  the  vital  passages  of  the  Chancellor's 
"Necessity  knows  no  law  speech"  to  The  Daily  Mail. 
A  merely  informative  bulletin  about  it  to  the  editor 
had  just  been  brought  back  from  the  Main  Telegraph 
Office  by  my  faithful  young  German  secretary,  Arthur 
Schrape,  with  the  message  that  "no  more  dispatches  to 


130  THE   ASSAULT 

England  are  being  accepted."  That  was  about  six 
o'clock  p.  m.,  at  least  three  hours  before  Berlin  or  the 
world  generally  had  any  knowledge  that  England  and 
Germany  were  actually  at  grips.  Communication  with 
the  United  States,  Schrape  had  been  told,  was  still 
open,  so  the  most  natural  thing  in  the  world  was  to 
attempt  to  get  Bethmann  Hollweg's  crucial  statements 
to  London  by  way  of  New  York.  Then  followed  a 
decision  on  my  part  which  was  to  prove  my  undoing — 
I  committed  the  diabolical  and  treasonable  crime  of 
calling  up  my  friend  and  colleague,  Mackenzie,  the 
able  correspondent  of  the  London  Times  (like  my  own 
paper,  The  Daily  Mail,  the  property  of  Lord  North- 
cliffe),  and  discussing  with  him  the  feasibility  of 
cabling  the  New  York  representatives  of  our  respective 
papers  to  relay  to  London  the  news  which  we  were 
unable  to  send  directly  from  Berlin.  We  were  tele- 
phoning in  German,  of  course,  as  every  one  for  three 
days  past  had  been  required  to  do,  and  we  realized 
that  practically  every  conversation,  especially  between 
highly  suspicious  characters  like  long-accredited  Berlin 
newspaper  correspondents,  was  being  overheard  by 
some  spy  with  an  ear  glued  to  a  receiver.  Knowing  all 
this  perfectly  well,  we  talked  with  entire  freedom  of  our 
nefarious  scheme  for  undermining  the  safety  of  the 
German  Empire.  Finally  it  was  agreed  that  Mackenzie 
should  come  to  my  rooms  in  the  Adlon  and  arrange  with 
me  there  the  text  of  a  cablegram  to  New  York  which 
should  bottle  up  the  German  fleet,  encircle  the  Crown 
Prince's  army  and  generally  wreck  the  Kaiser's  plans 
for  subjugating  Europe,  even  before  the  ink  on  the 
General  Staff's  plans  was  dry.  We  agreed  that  the 
surest  way  of  striking  this  blow  for  England  was  to 


THE   WAR   REACHES    ME  131 

cable  to  New  York  a  message  whose  veiled  language 
would  disclose  to  even  the  most  stupid  eye  that  it  con- 
cealed a  plot  of  heinous  proportions.  It  was  decided 
that  we  should  concoct  in  cable  language  a  cablegram 
reading  like  this : 

"Chancellor  just  delivered  importantest  speech 
Reichstag.  As  communication  England  unlonger  pos- 
sible suggest  your  cabling  Newyorks  news." 

Mackenzie,  accompanied  by  his  assistant,  Jelf,  now  a 
volunteer-officer  in  Kitchener's  army,  arrived  at  the 
Adlon;  we  canvassed  the  New  York  suggestion  in 
detail — amid  such  secrecy  that  Schrape,  a  very  keen- 
eared  German  of  twenty-two  and  a  patriot,  who  is  also 
serving  his  Kaiser  and  Empire  in  field-gray,  was  per- 
mitted to  participate  in  our  deliberations.  Then  we 
came  to  the  most  treacherous  decision  of  all,  viz.,  not 
to  carry  out  our  grandiose  project  for  confounding 
the  German  War  Party's  plot.  But  we  had  gone  far 
enough.  We  were  discovered.  Our  machinations, 
though  we  knew  it  not,  were  seen  through,  our  guns 
were  spiked,  and  all  that  remained  was  to  put  us,  as 
soon  as  possible,  where  we  could  do  no  further  harm. 
Any  number  of  Frenchmen  and  Russians  were  already 
in  the  same  place. 

Carelessly  leaving  behind  me  my  typewriting-ma- 
chine, fifty-pfennig  map  of  the  North  Sea,  copies  of 
my  preceding  week's  cablegrams,  scissors,  paste-pot, 
carbon-paper,  the  latest  Berlin  newspapers,  and  other 
telltale  emblems  of  my  infamy,  I  went  to  the  American 
Embassy  to  discuss  the  latest  and  obviously  greatest 
turn  of  the  war  kaleidoscope  with  Judge  Gerard. 


132  THE   ASSAULT 

There  were  a  thousand  and  one  questions  to  level  at 
him.  Was  it  true  that  Sir  Edward  Goschen  had  al- 
ready asked  him  to  take  charge  of  Great  Britain's 
interests?  What  would  panic-stricken  American  war 
refugees  do  now,  with  British  warships  blockading  the 
German  coasts?  Would  it  any  longer  be  safe  in  Ber- 
lin for  our  people  to  talk  their  own  language  in  public? 
Would  the  United  States  Government  be  making  any 
declaration  of  neutrality,  or  something  of  that  sort,  to 
the  German  Government?  Was  the  Embassy  still  in 
direct  communication  with  Washington  ?  Could  it  fa- 
cilitate the  transmission  of  our  news-cablegrams  to 
New  York  or  Chicago?  These  were  the  things  the 
journalistic  brethren  en  masse  were  anxious  to  know 
— and  I  recall  vividly  that  the  Ambassador  and  his 
staff,  despite  a  week  of  worries  unprecedented,  were 
still  smiling  and  managing  to  reply  to  every  question, 
however  abstract  or  unanswerable,  with  invincible 
equanimity.  I  have  since  heard  that  there  were  fellow 
citizens  who  found  Gerard,  Grew,  Harvey  and  Rud- 
dock "inattentive."  I  suppose  they  were  the  patriots 
who  couldn't  understand  why  local  checks  on  the  First 
National  Bank  of  Roaring  Branch,  Pennsylvania, 
"weren't  good"  at  the  Embassy,  and  who  were 
"peeved"  because  the  Ambassador  couldn't  tell  them 
why  Uncle  Sam  hadn't  already  started  a  fleet  of 
dreadnoughts  and  \mzrs-de-luxe  to  Hamburg  and  Bre- 
men to  rescue  his  stranded  tourist  family.  Or  one  of 
the  complainants,  who  was  "going  to  write  to  Bryan" 
about  our  "inefficient  diplomatic  service,"  may  have 
been  that  plutocratic  dame  from  Boston  who  de- 
manded that  Gerard  should  at  least  be  able  to  com- 
mandeer "a  special  train"  for  the  Americans,  even  if 


THE   WAR   REACHES    ME  133 

every  military  line  in  all  Germany  was  at  that  hour 
choked  with  troop-transports.  And  yet  we  Yankees 
rank  in  effete  Europe  as  a  cool-headed  and  common- 
sense  race ! 

What  dominated  my  thoughts,  of  course,  was 
whether,  after  all,  I  was  now  to  be  allowed  to  remain 
in  Germany.  My  desire  to  do  so  was  never  stronger — 
to  sit  on  the  edge  of  history  in  the  making  at  such  a 
moment.  Judge  Gerard  resolved  my  doubts.  I  should 
* 'cheer  up"  and  hope  for  the  best.  I  tarried  for  a  mo- 
ment longer,  to  chat  over  the  day's  overwhelming  de- 
velopments with  Mrs.  Gerard,  with  whom  I  had  not 
had  my  usual  daily  cup  of  tea  and  war  conference. 
We  wondered  how  long  it  would  be  before  a  formal 
declaration  of  war  between  England  and  Germany 
would  be  declared.  I  spoke  of  my  pleasurable  antici- 
pation at  being  permitted  to  live  through  the  mighty 
days  ahead  of  us  in  Berlin  with  herself  and  the  Am- 
bassador. They  would  be  experiences  worthy  of  trans- 
mission to  grandchildren.  We  agreed  we  should  be 
privileged  mortals,  in  a  way,  to  be  vouchsafed  so  tre- 
mendous an  opportunity.  I  commented  on  Mrs. 
Gerard's  amazing  lack  of  fatigue  after  four  days  and 
nights  of  trials  and  tribulations  with  terror-stricken 
compatriots.  She  spoke  of  the  lively  satisfaction  it 
had  given  her  to  be  of  service  of  so  homely  and  home- 
spun a  character,  and  remarked  that  young  Mrs.  Rud- 
dock had  been  "a  perfect  brick"  through  it  all,  an 
aide-de-camp  whom  a  field-marshal  might  have  en- 
vied.    .     .     . 

Eight  o'clock.  Dusk  had  just  fallen  as  I  quitted  the 
Embassy.  A  trio  of  servants  clustered  at  the  entrance 
was  examining'  in  the  dim  light  a  Tageblatt  "Extra" 


134  THE   ASSAULT 

which,  they  said,  was  just  out.    I  fairly  snatched  at  it. 
This  is  what  it  said : 


ENGLAND  BREAKS  OFF  DIPLOMATIC 
RELATIONS  WITH  GERMANY 

The  English  Ambassador  in  Berlin,  Sir  Ed- 
ward Goschen,  appeared  this  evening  in  the 
German  Foreign  Office  and  demanded  his  pass- 
ports. That  denotes,  in  all  probability,  war 
with  England ! 


I  ought  not  to  have  been  surprised,  yet  I  was  shocked. 
So  England  now,  at  last  and  really,  was  "in  it." 
The  realization  was  almost  numbing.  I  stood  read- 
ing and  reading  the  Extrablatt,  over  and  over  again. 
"Joe"  Grew  came  hurrying  up  in  his  automobile.  He, 
too,  had  the  Tageblatt  in  his  hand.  He  was  hastening 
to  tell  the  Ambassador  the  news.  It  was  true,  Grew 
said,  beyond  any  doubt.  Ye  Gods !  What  next  ?  The 
world's  coming  to  an  end,  one  thought,  was  about  all 
there  was  left.  And  that  seemed  nearer  at  hand  than 
any  of  us  ever  felt  it  before. 

I  started  now  for  the  English  Embassy,  across  the 
Wilhelms  Platz  and  down  the  Wilhelmstrasse  four  or 
five  blocks  to  the  north.  From  afar  I  heard  the  rumble 
of  a  mob,  not  a  singing  cheering  mob  such  as  had  been 
turning  Berlin  into  bedlam  for  a  week  before,  but  a 
mob  obviously  bent  on  more  serious  business.  I 
reached  the  Behrenstrasse,  two  hundred  feet  away 


(Drawn  for  the  Illustrated  London  News  from  a  description  by  the  author.) 
Berlin  Mob  Attacking  British  Embassy  on  the  night  of 
Aug.  4,  1914. 


THE    WAR    REACHES    ME  135 

aSerlintr  §  Sagetlatt 

n  n  d    Sandels-SSeltang-. 


tintUj.  i.  K<xt»ft  1814. 48.  >l|ni«.m. 


England  Deicji  Die  Diploma  Wen 
Bejieijungen  p  DenlfdilanD  afc 


2>cr  englifdjc  Statfdjafte?  In  ^Berlin  Sit  Gimmrb 
©ofdjen  crfd)icn  fjeute  a&cnb  im  fceuifdjett  2lu3* 
tonriigcu  SItttie  unt>  for&erte  feinc  ^3af|c.  $a8  be* 
bcuict  aHct  SBafjrfcIjctnHdjfcit  uartj  ben  fcrleg  mit 
(fngfattb! 

Extra  Edition  of  Berliner  Tageblatt  Announcing  War 
With  England 

from  the  English  Embassy.  Though  quite  dark,  I 
could  see  plainly  what  was  happening.  The  Embassy 
was  besieged  by  a  shouting  throng,  yelling  so  savagely 
that  its  words  were  not  distinguishable.  They  were 
not  chanting  Rule,  Britannia!  I  was  sure  of  that. 
It  was  imprecations,  inarticulate  but  ferocious  beyond 
description,  which  they  were  muttering.  I  saw  things 
hurtling  toward  the  windows.     From  the  crash  of 


136  THE   ASSAULT, 

glass  which  presently  ensued,  I  knew  they  were  hitting 
their  mark.  The  fusillade  increased  in  violence. 
When  there  would  be  a  particularly  loud  crash,  it 
would  be  followed  by  a  fiendish  roar  of  glee.  The 
street  was  crammed  from  curb  to  curb.  Many  women 
were  among  the  demonstrators.  A  mounted  policeman 
or  two  could  be  seen  making  no  very  vigorous  effort  to 
interfere  with  the  riot.  It  was  no  place  for  an  Eng- 
lishman, or  anybody  who,  being  smooth-shaven,  was 
usually  mistaken  for  one  in  Berlin.  I  did  not  dream  of 
trying  to  run  the  blockade.  The  rear,  or  Wilhelm- 
strasse,  entrance  of  the  Adlon  adjoins  the  Embassy. 
It  would  be  easy  to  gain  access  to  the  hotel  that  way. 
I  tried  the  door.  It  was  locked.  I  rang.  One  of  the 
light-blue  uniformed  page-boys  came,  peered  through 
the  glass,  recognized  me  and  fled  without  letting  me 
in.  I  rang  again.  No  one  came.  Wilhelmstrasse  now 
was  roaring  with  the  mob's  rage.  Ambassador 
Goschen's  subsequent  report  on  this  classic  manifesta- 
tion of  Kultur  described  how  he  and  his  staff,  seated 
in  the  front  drawing-room  of  the  Embassy,  narrowly 
escaped  being  stoned  to  death  by  missiles  which  now 
flew  thick  and  fast  through  every  paneless  window  of 
the  building. 

I  hailed  a  passing  horse-cab  and  told  the  driver  to 
make  for  the  Adlon  by  the  circuitous  route  of  the 
Voss-strasse,  Koniggratzer-strasse  and  Brandenburg 
Gate.  Ten  minutes  later  I  reached  the  hotel.  I  stepped 
to  the  desk  and  asked  for  Herr  Adlon,  Sr.,  or  Louis 
Adlon,  his  son;  said  the  Wilhelmstrasse  mob  might 
soon  decide  to  hold  an  overflow  meeting  and  attack 
the  hotel  premises,  and  that  certain  precautionary 


THE   WAR   REACHES    ME  137 

measures  might  be  useful.  The  lobby  of  the  hotel,  I 
noticed,  was  rapidly  filling  up  with  American  war  ref- 
ugees, of  whom  there  was  to  be  a  meeting.  I  recog- 
nized a  dozen  or  more  anxious  compatriots  whom  I 
had  seen  encamped  at  the  Embassy  during  the  pre- 
ceding two  or  three  days.  The  Ambassador  was 
expected,  they  said,  and  they  were  hoping  and  praying 
to  hear  from  him  that  the  Government  had  at  last 
effected  adequate  rescue  arrangements.  The  frock- 
coated  menial  at  the  hotel  desk,  only  a  few  hours  pre- 
vious servility  itself,  was  unusually  curt  when  I  asked 
where  the  Adlons  were.  I  did  not  think  of  it  at  the 
time,  but  his  rudeness  assumed  its  proper  importance 
in  the  scheme  of  things  as  they  later  developed.  I 
stopped  to  chat  with  Ambassador  Gerard,  who  had  just 
strolled  in.  Then  I  met  another  acquaintance,  Count 
von  Oppersdorff,  the  urbane  Silesian  Roman  Catholic 
political  leader,  a  familiar  and  welcome  figure  on  our 
Berlin  golf  links.  "So  England  has  come  in,"  re- 
marked the  Count.  "Yes,"  I  rejoined,  "you  hardly 
expected  her  to  keep  out,  did  you?"  "Well,"  said 
Oppersdorff,  with  a  meaningful  look  in  his  mild  blue 
eye,  "there  will  be  many  surprises — many  surprises." 
That  was  a  war  prophecy  which  has  come  true. 

I  dashed  up  to  my  room  to  write  a  dispatch  to  The 
Times  in  New  York  and  The  Tribune  in  Chicago, 
which  should  tell  briefly  of  the  outbreak  of  war  between 
England  and  Germany,  and  of  the  extraordinary 
scenes  in  front  of  His  Britannic  Majesty's  embassy. 
A  Lokal-Anzeiger" 'extra"  was  now»available,  with  this 
"cooked"  summary  of  the  events  which  had  precipi- 
tated the  climacteric  decision : 


138  THE    ASSAULT 

ENGLAND  HAS  DECLARED  WAR  ON 
GERMANY! 

Official  Report. 

This  afternoon,  shortly  after  the  speech  of 
the  Imperial  Chancellor,  in  which  the  offense 
against  international  law  involved  in  our  set- 
ting foot  on  Belgian  territory  was  frankly  ac- 
knowledged and  the  will  of  the  German  Empire 
to  make  good  the  consequences  was  affirmed, 
the  British  Ambassador,  Sir  Edward  Goschen, 
appeared  in  the  Reichstag  to  convey  to  For- 
eign Secretary  von  Jagow  a  communication 
from  his  Government.  In  this  communication 
the  German  Government  was  asked  to  make  an 
immediate  reply  to  the  question  whether  it  could 
give  the  assurance  that  no  violation  of  Belgian 
neutrality  would  take  place.  The  Foreign  Sec- 
retary forthwith  replied  that  this  was  not  pos- 
sible, and  again  explained  the  reasons  which 
compel  Germany  to  secure  herself  against  an 
attack  by  the  French  army  across  Belgian  soil. 
Shortly  after  seven  o'clock  the  British  Am- 
bassador appeared  at  the  Foreign  Office  to 
declare  war  and  demand  his  passports. 

We  are  informed  that  the  German  Govern- 
ment has  placed  military  necessities  before  all 
other  considerations,  notwithstanding  that  it 
had,  in  consequence  thereof,  to  reckon  that 
either  ground  or  pretext  for  intervention  would 
be  given  to  the  English  Government. 


THE   WAR   REACHES    ME  139 

It  was  this  news — reiterating  by  the  printed  word 
what  the  Chancellor  had  unblushingly  announced  in  the 
Reichstag:  that  military  necessities  had  taken  prece- 
dence of  "all  other  considerations,"  including  honor — 
which  aroused  the  ferocity  of  the  mob  and  incited  it, 
amid  mad  maledictions  on  "perfidious  Albion,"  to  vent 
its  fury  by  attempting  to  wreck  the  English  Embassy. 
This  German  "official  report,"  moreover,  besides  dis- 
torting the  facts  so  as  to  place  the  onus  for  the  out- 
break of  hostilities  exclusively  upon  England,  delib- 
erately misstated  the  object  of  Sir  Edward  Goschen's 
visit  to  the  Foreign  Office.  As  we  know  from  his 
famous  dispatch  on  the  last  phase,  he  did  not  "appear" 
there  "to  declare  war."  England's  declaration  of  war, 
as  a  matter  of  historical  record,  was  not  made  until 
eleven  p.  m.,  or  midnight  Berlin  time.  The  assault  on 
the  Embassy  by  Kultur's  knife-throwing,  stone-hurling 
and  window-breaking  cohorts  was  in  full  progress  by 
nine  o'clock.  It  began  almost  immediately  after  Sir 
Edward  Goschen's  return  from  his  celebrated  farewell 
interview  with  the  Imperial  Chancellor — the  torrid 
quarter  of  an  hour  in  which  von  Bethmann  Hollweg, 
incapable  of  concealing  Germany's  rage  over  the 
wrecking  of  her  war  scheme,  blackened  the  Teutonic 
escutcheon  for  all  time  by  branding  the  Belgian  treaty 
of  neutrality  as  a  "scrap  of  paper."  Of  all  egregious 
words  which  have  fallen  from  the  lips  of  German 
"diplomats,"  von  Bethmann  Hollweg's  immortal  in- 
discretions of  that  day  will  live  longest,  to  his  own  and 
his  country's  ineffaceable  shame. 

While  at  work  on  my  dispatches  in  my  hotel  room 
— it  was  now  about  nine  o'clock — I  could  hear  Unter 
den  Linden  below  my  windows  roaring  with  mob  fury 


140  THE   ASSAULT/ 

against  Britain.  "Kr'dmer-volk!"  (Peddler  nation!) 
"Rassen-Verrat!"  (Race  treachery!)  "Nieder  mit 
England!"  (Down  with  England!)  "Tod  den  Eng- 
Vdnder!"  (Death  to  the  English!)  were  the  shouts 
which  burst  forth  in  mad  chorus.  I  have  never  hunted 
beasts  in  the  jungle.  Never  have  my  ears  been  smit- 
ten with  the  snarl  and  growl  of  wild  animals  at  bay. 
I  never  heard  the  horizon  ring  with  the  tumult  of 
howling  dervishes  plunging  fanatically  to  the  attack. 
But  the  populace  of  Berlin  seemed  to  me  at  that  mo- 
ment to  be  giving  a  vivid  composite  imitation  of  them 
all.  Certainly  no  civilized  community  on  earth  ever 
surrendered  so  completely  to  all-obsessing  brute  fury 
as  the  war  mob  which  thirsted  for  British  blood  in 
"Athens-on-the-Spree"  on  the  night  of  August  4,  1914. 
It  gave  vent  to  all  the  animal  passions  and  breathed  the 
murder  instinct  said  to  be  inherent  in  the  average  hu- 
man when  unreasoning  rage  temporarily  supplants  san- 
ity. If  it  had  caught  sight  of  or  could  have  laid  hands 
on  Sir  Edward  Goschen,  or  any  one  else  identifiable 
as  an  Engldnder,  it  would  undoubtedly  have  torn  him 
limb  from  limb.  The  Germans  may  not  be  the  modern 
personification  of  the  Huns,  but  the  savagery  to  which 
their  Imperial  capital  ruthlessly  resigned  itself  on  the 
threshold  of  war  with  England  justifies  the  belief  that 
they  have  inherited  some  of  the  characteristics  of  At- 
tila's  fiends.  Next  morning's  Berlin  papers  explained 
in  all  seriousness,  on  police  authority,  that  the  mob 
"infuriated"  because  persons  in  the  English  Embassy 
had  thrown  "beggars'  pennies"  from  the  windows — a 
ludicrous  falsehood. 

Half  an  hour  later  I  came  down-stairs  to  motor  to 
the  Main  Telegraph  Office  with  my  American  cables. 


THE   WAR   REACHES   ME  141 

No  sooner  had  I  stepped  to  the  threshold  of  the  hotel 
than  three  policemen  grabbed  me — one  pinioning  my 
right  arm,  another  my  left,  and  the  third  gripping  me 
by  the  back  of  the  neck.  All  around  the  hotel  entrance 
stood  gesticulating  Germans  yelling,  like  Comanche 
Indians,  "Englischer  Spion!  Nach  Spandau  mit  ihm!" 
(English  spy!  To  Spandau  with  him!)  In  far  less 
time  than  it  takes  me  to  tell  it,  my  captors,  who  had 
now  drawn  their  sabers  to  "protect"  me,  as  they  ex- 
plained, from  the  murderous  intentions  of  the  mob, 
tossed  me  into  the  rear  seat  of  an  open  taxicab 
waiting  at  the  curb.  They  allowed  sufficient  time  to 
elapse  for  the  mob,  which  now  encircled  the  cab  shout- 
ing "Englischer  Hund!"  (English  dog!)  "Schiesst 
den  Spion!"  (Shoot  the  spy!)  and  other  cheery 
greetings,  to  cool  its  passions  on  my  hapless  head  and 
body  with  fisticuffs  and  canes,  while  a  misdirected  up- 
per-cut from  a  youth,  aimed  squarely  at  my  jaw,  did 
nothing  but  knock  my  hat  into  the  bottom  of  the  car 
and  send  my  eye-glasses  splintered  and  spinning  to 
the  same  destination.  The  police,  still  covering  me 
with  their  sabers,  shoved  me  to  the  floor  of  the  car 
and  gave  orders  to  the  driver  to  make  post-haste 
for  the  Mittel-strasse  police  station,  half  a  dozen  blocks 
away.  The  power  of  speech  having  temporarily  re- 
turned— I  wonder  if  my  readers  will  regard  it  a 
humiliating  confession  if  I  acknowledge  that  cold  chills 
were  now  chasing  up  and  down  my  spine? — I  ven- 
tured to  ask  the  policemen  to  whom  or  to  what  I  was 
indebted  for  this  "striking"  token  of  their  solicitude. 
"You  know  perfectly  well  why  you're  here,"  replied 
the  giant  who  was  gripping  me  by  the  right  arm  as  if 
I  might  be  contemplating  escape  from  the  lower  re- 


142  THE   ASSAULT 

gions  of  the  taxi  by  falling  through  or  flying  away. 
"The  mob  heard  the  Adlon  was  full  of  English  spies, 
and  they  were  waiting  for  you  to  come  out.  They'd 
have  killed  you  on  the  spot  if  we  hadn't  been  there 
to  rescue  you."  That  was,  of  course,  simply  an  ab- 
surd lie,  as  fast-crowding  events  of  the  succeeding 
night  were  to  demonstrate.  I  was  arrested  because 
I  had  been  denounced,  in  all  formality,  as  a  spy. 
If  the  German  authorities  are  inclined  to  assert  the 
contrary,  I  refer  them,  without  permission,  to  the 
document  reproduced  opposite  this  page — the  offi- 
cial and  original  denunciation  obligingly  slipped  by 
mistake  into  my  handbag  of  personal  belongings  at 
the  Police-Presidency  later  in  the  night,  when,  on  the 
demand  of  the  American  Ambassador,  I  was  precip- 
itately released  from  custody.  Doctor  Otto  Sprenger, 
of  Bremen,  was  one  of  the  police  spies  stationed  either 
in  the  Hotel  Adlon,  or  at  a  wire  therewith  connected, 
to  overhear  conversations,  and  who,  in  the  hour  of 
his  country's  extremities,  struck  a  herculean  blow  for 
Kaiser  and  Empire  by  catching  Mackenzie  (Kingsley 
is  as  near  as  he  could  get  the  name)  and  myself  in  our 
telephonic  plot  to  frustrate  Germany's  war  plans. 

I  was  still  remonstrating  with  the  police  about  the 
absurdity  of  my  arrest  when  the  taxi  pulled  up  in  front 
of  Mittel-strasse  station.  Evidently  news  of  our  im- 
pending arrival  had  preceded  us,  for  another  gang  of 
shouting  patriots  was  assembled  in  front  of  the  sta- 
tion and  proceeded  to  bestow  upon  me  the  same  sort 
of  a  welcome  as  I  received  at  the  hands  of  the 
mob  in  Unter  den  Linden.  Still  "protecting"  me  with 
their  drawn  sabers,  my  guardians  contrived  to  push 
and  drag  me  into  the  station-house  and  up  one  flight 


THE   WAR   REACHES   ME  143 

of  stairs  to  headquarters  before  the  crowd  had  done 
anything  more  serious  than  crack  me  over  the  head 
and  shoulders  half  a  dozen  times.  I  was  then  led  into 
the  back  room  of  the  station,  where,  as  I  soon  saw, 
pickpockets    and    other    criminals    are   taken   to    be 

Sacbtragabericht  des  Reobtsanwalts  und  Rotar 
Or.  Otto  Sprenger,  Bremen,  betreffend  Splonage 
lm  Hotel  Adlon,  Berlin. 


Am  heutigen  Tage  wurde  Mr.  Fred.  Wm.  W  1  1  e  lm  Hotel 
Adlon  antelefonlert  aua  der  Stadt,  und  zvar  von  einem  ge- 
wissen  Mr.  Klngsley  (?).   Es  wurde  lbm  die  lllttellung  ge- 
cacht,  dass  derselbe  (Klngsley)  elnem  Plan  ausflntflg  ge- 
macbt  habe  "die  Hlttellung  uber  Amerlka  nach  England  kom- 
men  zu  lassen".    Blerauf  verabredeten  belde,  daea  Kingaley  (?) 
ua  5  Ubr  Ins  Hotel  Adlon  kommen  sollte.   Dae  Geachah;  die 
belden  fereonen  oonferierten  bis  6  Ubr  und  verl lessen  so- 
dann  das  Hotel.   An  der  Confer enz  nahm  elne  drltte  Person, 
anschelnend  eln  Junger  Englander,  tell.    Herr  Kingaley  (t) 
maobte  ebenfalls  den  Elndrviok  elnes  jungen  Englanders. 

Berlin,  den  4.  August  1914. 

Facsimile  of  Original  Denunciation  of  the  Author 
as  an  "English  Spy" 

stripped  and  searched,  and  was  ordered  to  sit  down 
in  the  midst  of  a  group  of  twenty  policemen,  who 
eyed  me  with  glances  mingling  contempt  and  murder- 
ous intent. 

I    had    partially    recovered    my   equilibrium    after 
my  somewhat  exciting  experiences  of  the  previous 


144  THE   ASSAULT 

ten  minutes  and  found  myself  able  to  talk  dispas- 
sionately to  a  courteous  young  lieutenant  of  police 
who  was  in  charge  of  the  station.  I  told  him  I  was 
not  only  an  American,  but  a  long-time  resident  of 
Berlin,  with  a  home  of  my  own  in  Wilmersdorf, 
and  that  if  he  would  communicate  with  his  superior, 
Doctor  Henninger,  chief  of  the  political  police,  who 
had  known  me  for  years,  he  would  soon  be  able  to 
convince  himself  that  a  grotesque  mistake  had  been 
made  in  arresting  me  as  an  "English  spy."  The  lieu- 
tenant, who,  I  should  think,  was  the  only  man  in  all 
Berlin  who  had  not  yet  entirely  lost  his  reason,  asked 
me  politely  for  my  papers  and  other  credentials.  I 
handed  him  my  American  passport,  newly-issued  at  the 
Embassy  a  few  days  before,  a  visiting-card  bearing 
my  Berlin  home  address,  one  or  two  copies  of  my  most 
recent  news  telegrams  to  London  and  New  York, 
which  I  happened  to  have  with  me,  my  correspondent's 
identification  card  stamped  by  the  Berlin  police  de- 
partment, and  finally  a  letter  which  I  had  been  carry- 
ing with  me  during  the  war  crisis  for  precisely  some 
such  emergency — a  communication  sent  me  from  the 
Imperial  yacht  in  the  summer  of  1913,  acknowledging 
in  gracious  terms  a  copy  of  Men  Around  the  Kaiser, 
which  William  II  had  deigned  to  accept  at  my  hands. 
The  police  lieutenant  almost  clicked  heels  and  came 
to  the  salute  when  he  saw  that  his  prisoner  was  the 
possessor  of  so  priceless  a  document.  He  asked  me 
to  "calm"  myself  and  await  developments.  "Es  wird 
schon  gut  sein."  Which  in  real  language  means  that 
"everything  will  be  all  right." 

As  their  superior  officer  had  not  lopped  off  my  head 
on  sight,  and  even  condescended  to  hold  courteous 


THE   WAR   REACHES    ME  145 

converse  with  the  "spy,"  the  group  of  policemen  in 
whose  midst  I  found  myself  now  warmed  up  to  me 
perceptibly. 

"You  are  an  American,  eh?"  ejaculated  one  of 
them.  "I  wonder  if  you  know  my  brother  in  Minne- 
sota?   His  name  is  Paul  Richter." 

I  was  genuinely  sorry  I  had  never  met  Herr  Richter 
— probably  he  did  not  live  in  the  Red  River  Valley, 
which  was  the  only  part  of  Minnesota  I  knew,  I  ex- 
plained. I  knew  some  Richters  in  my  native  county 
of  La  Porte,  Indiana,  but  they  had  never  claimed  the 
honor,  to  my  knowledge,  of  having  a  brother  in  the 
Kaiser's  police.  While  Schutzmann  Richter  and  I 
were  doing  our  best  to  discover  that  the  world  is  small, 
noise  of  fresh  commotion,  such  as  had  greeted  my  own 
arrival  at  the  station,  ascended  from  the  street.  Ap- 
parently a  fresh  "bag"  had  come  in.  A  second  later, 
of  all  people  on  earth,  who  should  be  pushed  into  the 
room,  with  three  policemen  at  his  neck  and  arms,  but 
my  very  disheveled  friend,  Tower.  He  was  hatless, 
his  collar  and  tie  were  awry,  every  hair  of  his  Goethe- 
like blond  head  was  on  end,  and  he  cut  altogether  the 
figure  of  a  very  much  perturbed  young  man.  There 
were  no  mirrors  about,  so  I  can  not  say  with  certainty 
how  I  myself  looked,  but  I  am  sure  I  could  have 
easily  been  mistaken  for  Tower's  twin  at  that  moment. 
Partners  in  misery  and  anxiety  we  certainly  were. 
Tower,  it  appeared,  was  denounced  to  the  spy-hunt- 
ers at  the  Adlon  by  a  chauffeur  he  had  engaged 
to  drive  him  a  day  or  two  before — the  man  who  pi- 
loted the  machine  which  was  hired  out  to  Adlon  guests 
at  fancy  rates  per  hour.  Presently  the  chauffeur  him- 
self bounded  into  the  room,  shouting  like  a  madman. 


146  [THE   ASSAULT 

"Now  we've  got  him — the  damned  English  cur!"  he 
snarled,  shaking  his  fist,  first  in  Tower's  face,  and 
then,  recognizing  me,  in  mine,  with  an  oath  and  a 
"You,  too,  pig-dog!"  The  chauffeur  now  ranted  his 
reasons  for  denouncing  both  Tower  and  me.  "I'm  an 
old  African  soldier!"  he  yelled.  "I  know  these  con- 
temptible Engl'dnder.  This  Tower  (he  called  it  Toe- 
ver,  which  was  the  way  Germans  used  phonetically  to 
pronounce  a  former  American  ambassador's  name)  is 
the  notorious  Times  correspondent !"  Tower  impetu- 
ously denied  this  soft  impeachment,  and  pointed  out 
that  instead  of  being  the  Thunderer's  representative, 
he  was  the  correspondent  of  the  Daily  News,  "the  only 
Germanophile  English  newspaper."  Tower  himself 
was  never  Germanophile,  but  it  was  grasping  at  a  le- 
gitimate straw  so  to  describe  his  London  paper.  I 
could  not  conscientiously  identify  The  Daily  Mail  as 
deutschfreundlich,  or,  I  regretfully  mused,  it  might  be 
the  means  of  saving  my  neck. 

Now  there  was  more  noise  from  the  lower  re- 
gions. Whom  had  they  nabbed  this  time.  Astonished 
as  I  was  to  see  Tower  marched  in,  I  fairly  gasped 
when  the  newest  batch  of  prisoners  was  shoved 
into  the  room,  for  it  was  headed  by  my  young 
secretary,  Schrape,  and  included  Mrs.  Hensel,  a 
gray-haired  German-American  lady  and  an  old  Berlin 
friend  of  my  family,  and  Miles  Bouton,  of  the  local 
staff  of  the  Associated  Press.  Schrape  and  Mrs.  Hen- 
sel had  been  denounced  at  the  Adlon  as  my  accom- 
plices in  espionage — Schrape  for  obvious  reasons,  and 
Mrs.  Hensel  because  she  had  called  to  see  me  at  the 
hotel  a  few  minutes  after  my  arrest,  undoubtedly,  of 
course,  to  bring  me  illicit  information  or  receive  her 


THE   WAR   REACHES    ME  147 

"orders."  She  had  come,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  as  count- 
less acquaintances  of  mine  had  been  doing  throughout 
the  week,  to  ask  for  advice  or  assistance  in  the  midst 
of  the  topsy-turvy  conditions  into  which  life  in  Berlin 
had  been  so  suddenly  plunged.  Schrape  was  remark- 
ably cool.  So  was  Bouton,  who  insisted  upon  express- 
ing himself  with  such  freedom  about  the  indignities 
heaped  upon  him  that  I  momentarily  expected  to  wit- 
ness his  decapitation.  Mrs.  Hensel,  poor  soul,  was 
frightened  speechless  and  between  her  tears  could  only 
incoherently  make  me  understand  that  she  had  no 
sooner  asked  for  my  name  at  the  Adlon  desk  than  the 
clerks  handed  her  over  to  the  police.  Bouton  seemed 
to  owe  his  arrest  to  the  fact  that  he  was  in  Tower's 
company  in  the  Adlon  lobby,  attending  the  meeting  of 
American  war  refugees.  Tower  had  been  savagely 
cracked  over  the  head  by  an  Adlon  waiter  armed  with 
a  tray  while  being  hustled  out  of  the  hotel  by  the  po- 
lice. Mrs.  Bouton,  tearfully  protesting  against  her 
husband's  arrest,  had  herself  been  threatened  with  ar- 
rest or  something  worse  if  she  did  not  instantly  "hold 
her  mouth."  Just  what  part  the  Adlon  staff  of  clerks, 
porters,  waiters  and  page-boys  played  in  our  arrest 
was  not  made  clear  to  me  until  the  next  day ;  of  which 
more  in  the  succeeding  chapter. 

As  soon  as  the  "gang  of  spies,"  as  the  policemen  in 
the  room  now  pleasantly  called  us,  was  complete, 
Tower,  Schrape  and  Bouton  were  lined  up  against  the 
wall  and  ordered  to  raise  their  hands  above  their  heads, 
while  their  clothes  were  searched  for  concealed  weap- 
ons or  incriminating  espionage  evidence.  While  my 
fellow  prisoners  (except  Mrs.  Hensel)  were  undergo- 
ing examination,   a  typical  young  Berlin  thug,  evi- 


148  THE   ASSAULT 

dently  a  thief,  was  brought  in,  and  took  his  place 
adjacent  to  my  colleagues,  also  to  be  searched.  The 
room  was  now  resounding  with  encouraging  shouts 
from  overwrought  policemen  that  "the  English  dogs 
ought  to  be  hanged."  Others  suggested  that  "Span- 
dau,"  the  spy-shooting  gallery,  was  a  more  appropriate 
place  for  us  than  the  gallows.  For  some  God-willed 
or  other  mysterious  reason  I  was  not  searched.  That 
gave  me  only  temporary  relief,  for  we  were  presently 
informed  that  we  would  be  taken  to  the  Police-Pres- 
idency (central  station)  for  the  night  and  "dealt  with 
there."  That  meant  searching  of  everybody,  I  felt 
morally  sure,  and  it  was  then  that  the  tongue  of  me 
began  cleaving  to  the  roof  of  my  mouth,  while  my 
throat  parched  with  terror.  For  in  a  leather  card-case 
in  my  inside  pocket  I  carried  a  telegraph  code,  utterly 
innocuous  in  itself — a  make-shift  affair  got  up  during 
the  preceding  forty-eight  hours  and  of  which  I  posted 
a  duplicate  to  London,  with  a  view  to  explaining  to  my 
editor  in  cipher  my  movements  and  whereabouts  if  I 
had  suddenly  to  leave  Berlin.  It  was  a  quite  harmless 
string  of  phrases  reading  like  this : 

"My  wife's  condition  has  become  critical,  and  physi- 
cians recommend  immediate  departure  if  catastrophe 
is  to  be  avoided." 

All  this  was,  of  course,  in  German,  and  meant  (as 
the  code  explained)  that  I  was  proceeding  to  the  Hotel 
Angleterre  in  Copenhagen.  Another  phrase  substi- 
tuted "boy's"  for  "wife's"  and  meant  that  I  was  leav- 
ing for  the  Hotel  Amstel  in  Amsterdam,  etc.,  etc.  It 
dawned  instantly  upon  me  that  if  the  Berlin  political 


JHE   WAR   REACHES    ME  149 

police,  at  such  a  witching  hour,  discovered  on  a  sus- 
pected spy  a  telegraphic  code  of  so  "incriminating" 
a  character,  he  could  hardly  look  forward  to  anything 
beyond  the  regulation  thrill  at  sunrise.  I  might  have 
been  able  to  explain  in  prosaic  peace-times,  I  solilo- 
quized, that  many  newspaper  correspondents  use  pri- 
vate codes  in  communicating  with  their  editors,  but 
to  convince  a  Berlin  police  official  at  that  moment  that 
my  code  was  of  innocent  import  struck  me  as  the 
quintessence  of  physical  impossibility. 

I  was  undergoing,  I  think,  all  the  emotions  of  fear 
and '  trembling  when  our  quintette  of  prisoners  was 
now  marched  down  to  the  street  and  piled  into  taxis  for 
transportation  to  the  Polizei-Prasidium  in  Alexander- 
Platz,  two  miles  across  town.  An  enormous  throng 
filled  the  Mittel-strasse,  snarling  with  rage.  The 
sight  of  us  maddened  them  into  a  fiendish  scream. 
Tower  and  I  were  pushed  into  the  first  car,  which  hap- 
pened to  be  the  Adlon  machine  he  had  hired  and 
was  doubtless  still  paying  for,  and  which  was  driven 
by  his  infuriated  chauffeur.  The  "covering"  sabers 
of  the  police,  one  each  of  whom  guarded  Tower 
and  myself,  respectively  in  the  front  and  back  seats, 
did  not  prevent  the  mob  from  belaboring  us  once 
more  with  fists  and  sticks,  to  the  accompaniment  of 
unprintable  epithets  and  curses.  My  mind,  however, 
was  occupied  completely  with  how  to  get  rid  of  that 
code  nestling  in  my  inside  pocket.  Nothing  short  of 
entire  insensibility  could  have  deflected  my  thoughts 
from  that  all-absorbing  issue.  I  was  thinking  hard 
and  quickly. 

Tower's  chauffeur,  proud  to  be  serving  the  Kaiser 
on  so  historic  an  occasion,  did  not  drive  us,  as  he 


150  THE   ASSAULT 

would  naturally  and  ordinarily  have  done,  through  the 
darkened  side  streets  leading  from  Mittel-strasse  to 
Alexander-Platz,  but  decided  to  drag  us  in  triumph 
like  the  victims  chained  to  Nero's  chariots,  down  the 
brilliantly  illuminated  Unter  den  Linden,  which, 
though  it  was  now  nearly  eleven  o'clock,  was  packed 
with  war  demonstrators.  Crossing  to  the  more  crowded 
southern  side,  at  a  point  near  the  Hotel  Bristol,  the 
driver  threw  on  his  top-speed  and  whirled  us  down 
the  glittering  boulevard  at  breakneck  pace.  As  for 
himself,  with  a  policeman  at  his  side,  and  two  behind 
him  pinioning  Tower  and  myself,  he  was  frantic  with 
super-patriotic  joy.  Now  steering  with  his  left  hand, 
he  waved  his  right  madly  through  space  at  the  gaping 
curb  crowds,  and  yelled,  so#  that  they  might  know 
what  it  all  meant:  "English  spies!  Now  we've  got 
'em!  Now  we've  got  'em!  Hurrah!  Hurrah!"  It 
was  a  great  moment  in  that  illustrious  Kraftwagen- 
fuhrer's  career.  Nothing  in  his  greasy  past  had  ever 
approached  it  in  tremendousness.  He  saw  the  Iron 
Cross  dangling  in  certain  outlines  before  his  ecstatic 
vision — the  reward  for  valor  in  the  hour  of  his  Father- 
land's need. 

I  was  still  brooding  over  that  code,  but  even 
while  being  paraded  past  the  Berliners,  I  was  actively 
at  work  on  a  scheme  for  its  removal.  Necesssity  is, 
indeed,  the  mother  of  invention,  and  to  this  hour 
I  do  not  fully  comprehend  how  I  came  to  find  the 
courage  or  ingenuity  to  do  what  I  was  now  success- 
fully accomplishing.  We  had  reached  the  Opera,  were 
approaching  the  Castle,  and  Alexander-Platz  was  less 
than  five  minutes  away.  The  need  for  quick  work 
was  growing  more  urgent  from  second  to  second.    My 


JHE   WAR   REACHES    ME  151 

policeman  held  me  firmly  by  the  right  arm.  My  left 
was  entirely  free.  With  it  I  was  able  easily  to  reach 
the  right-hand  inside  pocket  of  my  coat,  wherein  the 
card-case  containing  the  code  was  lodged.  I  contrived 
to  finger  my  way  into  the  case  without  attracting  the 
attention  of  my  jailer,  who,  Allah  be  praised,  was  still 
too  fascinated  by  the  plaudits  of  the  crowds  to  be 
more  than  mildly  interested  in  me.  I  could  "feel"  the 
code  now.  It  was  of  flimsy  tissue  paper  and  could 
be  easily  torn  into  shreds.  A  sufficiently  long  interval 
had  elapsed  since  my  last  visit  to  the  manicure  to  make 
my  finger-nails  highly  effective  for  the  purpose,  and 
by  degrees  which  seemed  infinitely  slow  I  managed  to 
crumple  and  dessicate  the  "guilty"  document  and  by 
"palming"  and  working  the  bits  into  the  spaces  be- 
tween my  fingers  the  whole  thing  was  effectually  de- 
stroyed. I  withdrew  my  hand,  stuck  it  into  the  outside 
left-hand  pocket  of  my  coat  to  withdraw  a  handker- 
chief, blew  my  nose  and,  while  in  that  unforbidden 
act,  let  I  don't  know  how  many  hundreds  of  tissue 
paper  particles  fly  back  of  me  into  the  wind  of  Berlin's 
bristling  night  air.  I  was  saved.  They  could  search 
me  now  to  their  hearts'  content.  I  found  that,  some- 
how or  other,  the  power  of  speech  had  suddenly  re- 
turned, and  a  moment  later  I  was  saying  cheerily  to 
my  Schutzmann  friend,  "Well,  we're  here  now." 

The  details  of  what  happened  in  the  big  room  of 
the  Police-Presidency  into  which  we  were  now  ushered 
— my  friend  Simons,  of  the  Amsterdam  Telegraaf,  and 
Nevinson,  special  correspondent  of  The  Daily  News, 
who  were  found  in  Tower's  room  at  the  Adlon  and 
arrested  on  that  "evidence,"  had  arrived  there  be- 
fore us — are  brief  and  unessential.     What  had  been 


152  .THE   ASSAULT^ 

taking  place  during  the  preceding  two  hours  is  vastly 
more  to  the  point.  Ambassador  Gerard,  who  was  at 
the  Adlon  when  we  were  arrested,  seems  to  have 
cleared  for  action  in  his  typically  shirt-sleeves  diplo- 
matic fashion.  He  dispatched  First  Secretary  Grew 
to  the  Foreign  Office  to  demand  our  instantaneous  re- 
lease. Grew  informed  Under-Secretary  Zimmermann 
that  if  Germany  continued  to  treat  American  citizens 
and  newspaper  correspondents  in  accordance  with  the 
practises  of  the  Middle  Ages  (Conger  was  still  languish- 
ing in  jail  at  Gumbinnen)  the  Fatherland  was  danger- 
ously likely  to  lose  the  esteem  of  the  only  first-class 
Power  in  the  world  which  seemed  still  to  be  on  speak- 
ing terms  with  her.  Herr  Zimmermann,  who  under- 
stands plain  English  when  it  is  spoken  to  him,  was 
apologetic  in  the  extreme.  He  told  Grew  that  imme- 
diate steps  would  be  taken  to  liberate  me  and  my 
friends  and  that  the  Foreign  Office  "regretted"  that 
such  indignities  should  have  been  heaped  upon  inno- 
cent persons.  Mr.  Gerard  evidently  determined  to  take 
no  chances,  for  the  first  secretary  was  dispatched  to 
the  Police-Presidency  with  the  embassy  automobile, 
and  with  instructions  to  demand  our  delivery  in  the 
flesh  and  stay  there  till  it  was  made.  Meantime  the 
Foreign  Office  had  sent  urgent  telephonic  instructions 
to  the  police  to  let  us  out.  We  were  asked  to  fill  up 
certain  identification  forms  and  exhibit  some  more  pa- 
pers, and  then,  in  accents  of  courteous  explanation, 
were  assured  that  an  "error"  had  unfortunately  been 
made.  We  should  "not  hesitate,  if  anybody  molested 
us  again,"  to  call  up  Police  Headquarters,  and  matters 
would  be  speedily  set  right.  It  was  not  probable,  we 
were  assured,  that  we  would  have  any  more  trouble. 


THE   WAR   REACHES    ME  153 

If  we  desired,  a  police  escort  was  at  our  service,  so 
that  we  might  return  to  the  hotel  or  to  the  Embassy  in 
certain  safety. 

We  had  just  been  bowed  out  of  the  place  of  our 
brief  detention  when  the  familiar  outlines  of  "Joe" 
Grew  loomed  into  view,  down  the  corridor,  and  with 
him  "Fritz,"  the  German  "life-guard"  of  the  Embassy. 
It  is  not  customary  for  American  men  to  kiss  each 
other,  but  I  confess  here  to  having  been  momentarily 
inspired  with  a  strong  temptation  to  lavish  some  form 
of  osculatory  gratitude  upon  Grew.  Certainly  I  felt 
that  there  was  nothing  quite  so  good  on  God's  foot- 
stool just  then  as  to  be  an  American  citizen.  When 
Grew  insisted  on  packing  all  five  of  us — Tower,  Mrs. 
Hensel,  Bouton,  Schrape  and  myself — into  the  car  and 
driving  us  back  to  the  Embassy  (it  was  now  the  ro- 
mantic hour  of  one  a.  m.)  behind  the  protecting  folds 
of  the  Stars  and  Stripes  flapping  defiantly  at  the  wind- 
shield, I  vowed  a  solemn,  silent  oath — to  aspire  in 
such  days  as  might  still  be  left  to  me  for  an  oppor- 
tunity some  day  to  reciprocate  in  kind  the  service  the 
Ambassador  and  Grew  had  that  night  rendered  me, 
the  supreme  service  men  can  render  a  fellow  man — 
to  save  his  life. 

They  were  to  be  called  upon,  though  I  did  not  then 
know  it,  to  rescue  me  once  again  before  either  they  or 
I  were  twenty-four  hours  older. 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE   LAST   FAREWELL 

SUCH  sleep  as  I  enjoyed  in  what  remained  of  the 
night  between  August  4  and  5  was  secured,  for 
the  first  time  in  a  week,  beneath  my  own  roof.  I  had 
finished  with  the  "hospitality"  of  the  Hotel  Adlon  for 
all  time  to  come.  After  a  brief  visit  at  the  Embassy, 
to  assure  the  Ambassador  of  my  everlasting  gratitude 
for  having  thrown  out  the  life-line,  and  seeing  Mrs. 
Hensel  safely  started  for  her  home  in  Charlottenburg 
under  trusted  escort,  I  betook  myself  to  Wilmersdorf, 
where  our  faithful  little  German  governess,  Anna 
Kranz,  had  been  holding  the  fort  all  summer  during 
the  absence  of  my  family  in  the  United  States.  I  tele- 
phoned Fr'dulein  from  the  Embassy  a  summary  of  the 
night's  events,  fearing  that  police  minions  might  be 
paying  me  a  domiciliary  visit  and  cause  the  poor  girl  un- 
necessary alarm.  I  told  her  Schrape  was  coming  home 
with  me  for  the  night  and  that  as  neither  of  us  had 
had  a  bite  since  the  preceding  noon,  we  could  do  full 
justice  to  anything,  however  frugal,  which  might  at 
that  romantic  hour  still  be  discoverable  in  the  larder. 
It  was  a  wide-eyed,  then  tearful  and  always  sympa- 
thetic Thuringian  damsel,  who  listened  to  our  story 
over  bread  and  cheese  at  the  romantic  hour  of  two- 
thirty  a.  m.  I  can  hear  her  now  interrupting  with  a 
characteristic  and  condoling  "Aber,  Herr  Wile!" 

154 


THE   LAST    FAREWELL  155 

Having  dispatched  Schrape  to  the  Adlon  early  next 
day  to  pay  my  bill  and  fetch  the  belongings  I  had  had 
so  abruptly  to  leave  behind  me  there  the  night  before, 
I  proceeded  to  town.  At  the  Embassy  was  a  host  of 
friends  anxious  for  news  of  me.  The  most  absurd 
rumors,  it  seemed,  were  in  circulation.  There  was  a 
detailed  version  of  my  last  moments  in  front  of  a 
firing-squad  at  Spandau,  and  somebody  "who  had  a 
friend  at  the  Police  Presidency"  had  told  somebody 
else  that  I  was  in  shackles  which  would  probably  not 
be  removed  till  the  war  was  over — if  then.  Still 
another  tale  related  circumstantially  of  how  I  had  been 
"hurried"  from  Berlin  at  the  dead  of  night,  under 
military  guard,  to  the  Dutch  frontier,  across  which, 
by  this  time,  I  was  unceremoniously  "expelled." 

When  I  was  able  to  gain  the  ear  of  the  Ambassador 
— the  American  war- refugee  panic  was  now  at  tem- 
pestuous zenith,  with  the  Embassy  like  a  place  be- 
sieged— I  represented  to  him  that  I  feared  my  hopes 
of  remaining  in  Germany,  after  what  had  happened, 
were  slender  in  the  extreme.  Scouts  had  brought  in 
the  intelligence,  I  informed  him,  that  a  miniature  mob 
of  evident  purpose  was  waiting  in  front  of  the  Equita- 
ble Building,  where  The  Daily  Mail  office  was,  now  and 
then  knowingly  pointing  to  our  big  gilt  window-sign, 
in  order  that  passers-by  might  understand  why  traffic 
was  being  blocked  in  front  of  No.  59  Friedrichstrasse. 
If  the  crowd  waited  long  enough,  it  probably  saw  at 
work  the  sign  men  whom  I  had  ordered  to  take  down 
the  red  rag.  Discretion  is  ever  the  better  part  of 
valor,  and  I  felt  no  compelling  desire  to  superintend 
the  job  in  person. 

The  Ambassador  thought  I  was  unduly  disturbed. 


156  THE   ASSAULT 

He  was  convinced  that  my  arrest  was  purely  an  un- 
fortunate blunder,  due  to  a  combination  of  officious 
patriotism  and  excessive  zeal,  and  meant  nothing.  I 
was  inclined  to  agree  with  him.  Berlin  and  the  Ber- 
liners  had  suddenly  lost  their  minds,  and  nothing 
which  occurs  when  a  community  of  men  are  in  a  state 
of  mental  aberration  ought  in  reason  to  be  charged 
against  them.  I  had  obviously  fallen  victim  to  the 
mass  dementia  which  robbed  Germans  of  their  senses 
when  their  lingering  fears  of  war  with  England  be- 
came terrifying  actuality.  I  certainly  did  not  overesti- 
mate the  importance  of  the  episode. 

I  now  ran  across  von  Wiegand  of  the  United  Press 
(as  he  then  was)  and  Swing,  of  the  Chicago  Daily 
News.  Being  Americans,  like  myself,  they  had  just 
taken  the  precaution  of  applying  to  the  Foreign  Office 
for  credentials  which  would  protect  them  from  such 
delicate  attentions  as  the  police  had  shown  me.  They 
suggested  that  I  should  see  Legationsrat  Heilbron  and 
get  an  Ausweiskarte.  Swing  was  in  jubilant  mood. 
He  had  a  scheme  under  promising  way  to  accompany 
Major  Langhorne,  our  military  attache,  to  the  front 
as  a  "secretary."  My  heart  pumped  with  envy.  Von 
Wiegand  had  not  yet  worked  out  his  forthcoming  cam- 
paign for  interviewing  the  German  Empire  and  the 
Vatican,  but  all  of  us  felt  sure  that  his  German  noble 
origin,  plus  his  nose  for  news  and  excellent  official 
connections,  would  land  Karl  Heinrich  on  his  feet, 
as  far  as  reporting  the  war  was  concerned,  if  any  one 
was  going  to  be  favored  at  all.  The  Anglo-American 
newspaper  fraternity  was  already  a  rather  decimated 
•body.  Conger,  of  the  Associated  Press,  was  still 
jailed  at  Gumbinnen.      Wilcox,  of  The  Daily  Tele- 


,THE   LAST   FAREWELL  15? 

graph,  had  been  fortunate  enough,  only  a  few  days 
previous,  to  get  to  Russia.  Ford,  o f  The  Morning  Post, 
had  not  waited  for  the  crash  and  left  for  England  on 
one  of  the  last  peace-time  trains.  Tower,  my  night's 
partner  in  woe,  had  slept  in  the  porter's  basement 
of  the  American  Embassy  and  was  now  a  refugee 
in  the  British  Embassy,  where,  I  understood,  all  the 
other  purely  English  correspondents  were  being 
rounded  up  during  the  day,  to  accompany  Sir  Edward 
Goschen  and  his  staff  out  of  Germany  next  morning 
on  the  safe-conduct  train  provided  by  the  German  gov- 
ernment. Mackenzie,  of  The  Times,  with  whom  I  had 
plotted  by  telephone,  was  still  unarrested,  for  some 
miraculous  reason ;  I  had  not  yet  seen  the  original  "de- 
nunciation" of  our  espionage  operations,  from  which 
I  later  knew  that  he  had  only  been  identified  as 
"Kingsley."  He  can  blame  that  circumstance,  no 
doubt,  for  having  been  denied  the  privilege  of  my  own 
experiences. 

At  five  o'clock,  the  customary  hour  for  newspaper 
men  to  visit  the  Foreign  Office,  I  went  to  call  on  Lega- 
tionsrat  Heilbron.  He  had  not  yet  come  in,  so  I  sent 
my  card  to  his  colleague,  Legationsrat  Esternaux,  with 
whom  I  had  enjoyed  professional  acquaintance  ever 
since  the  hour  of  my  arrival  in  Germany,  thirteen  years 
previous  to  the  week.  I  assured  Esternaux  that  I  cher- 
ished no  particular  animosity  toward  the  police  au- 
thorities for  my  silly  arrest,  being  convinced  that  a 
grotesque  mistake  alone  was  responsible.  Mildly  apolo- 
getic, he  acquiesced  in  this  view. 

"You  were  a  victim,"  Esternaux  then  began,  "of 
our  just  and  universal  rage  over  the  treacherous  and 
treasonable  action  of  England  in  stabbing  us  in  the 


158  [THE   ASSAULT 

back.  Never,  as  long  as  they  live,  will  Germans  for- 
give the  perfidy  of  the  British  Government  in  be- 
traying the  common  blood  in  favor  of  uncivilized  Pan- 
Slavism.  It  is  the  most  criminal  faithlessness  in  the 
world's  history — this  taking  advantage  of  our  diffi- 
culties to  vent  long  pent-up  spite  against  the  merely 
dangerous  German  commercial  rival."  Herr  Ester- 
naux  did  not  mention  Belgium,  though  the  flow  of 
his  righteous  indignation  was  increasing  from  phrase 
to  phrase.  "Race  treason !  That  is  what  has  fired  the 
German  soul  to  its  depths!  That  is  what  caused  last 
night's  unseemly  demonstrations.  Nobody  condones 
mob  fury  less  than  the  German  Government,  but  it  is 
explained,  if  not  justified,  by  what  has  happened. 
Of  one  thing  the  world  may  be  sure — with  whatever 
bitterness  we  make  war  on  our  Russian  and  French 
foes,  it  will  be  nothing — it  will  be  child's-play — com- 
pared to  the  spirit  of  revengeful  rancor  and  holy 
wrath  in  which  we  shall  fight  the  English  race-traitors. 
That  was  the  temper  of  the  Berlin  mob  last  night.  It 
is  the  temper  in  which  we  are  going  to  war  with  Great 
Britain.  It  is  the  temper  in  which  we  shall  wage  the 
struggle  with  her  to  the  bitter  end.  Make  no  mistake 
about  that."  I  had  listened,  on  the  authoritative  prem- 
ises of  the  Imperial  German  Government,  to  perhaps 
the  first  official  proclamation  of  the  hate  and  fright  ful- 
ness programme  so  far  uttered.  Gott  strafe  England! 
How  graphically  succeeding  events  were  to  bear  it  out ! 
After  Legationsrat  Esternaux  had  fired  this  high- 
explosive,  he  ushered  me  out,  and  I  knocked  on  Lega- 
tionsrat Heilbron's  door,  fifteen  yards  farther  down 
the  passageway.    Fur-mittens  and  ear-muffs  are  not 


THE   LAST   FAREWELL  159 

de  rigueur  in  northern  Germany  in  midsummer,  but  I 
should  have  worn  them  that  afternoon  of  August  5, 
for  the  reception  awaiting  me  at  Heilbron's  hands  was 
of  arctic  frigidity.  It  was  a  vastly  changed  Heilbron 
from  the  obliging  functionary  who  had  pressed  upon 
me,  forty-eight  hours  previous,  copies  of  the  German 
White  Paper,  in  order  that  I  might  spread  the  official 
truth  about  "how  the  Fatherland  had  worked  to  pre- 
vent the  war"  broadcast  in  England  and  the  United 
States.  It  was  also  a  strangely  less  courteous  Lego- 
tionsrat  than  the  one  (Esternaux)  whose  presence  I 
had  just  quitted. 

"Herr  Legationsrat/'  I  began,  "I  have  come  to  ask 
you  for  an  Ausweiskarte.  You  know,  I  suppose,  of  my 
little  experience  last  night.  I  am  quite  willing  to  take 
my  chances  with  the  mob,  but  I  ought  to  have  some- 
thing to  protect  me  from  the  excesses  of  the  police." 

"Mobs  are  mobs,"  he  rejoined.  "I  can  do  nothing 
for  you." 

"That  is  strange,"  I  interposed.  "Surely  you  know 
that  the  American  Ambassador  has  arranged  for  my 
remaining  in  Germany?" 

"I  know  nothing  about  that  whatever,"  said  Heil- 
bron. 

"Well,  Legationsrat  Esternaux  does,"  I  retorted, 
"because  he  told  me  so  not  five  minutes  ago,  and  he 
said  you  would  issue  the  necessary  credentials." 

Heilbron,  who  like  all  German  bureaucrats  has  the 
backbone  of  a  crushed  worm  in  the  presence  of  su- 
perior authority,  or  the  mere  suggestion  of  it,  now 
reached  for  his  telephone-receiver  and  asked  to  be  con- 
nected with  somebody  in  the  Foreign  Office.    He  re- 


160  THE   ASSAULT 

peated  the  object  of  my  call  to  whomever  was  at  the 
other  end  of  the  line,  nodded  in  assent  to  something 
apparently  said  to  him,  then  turned  to  me : 

"It  is  just  as  I  thought.  The  Foreign  Office  can  do 
nothing  for  you.  If  you  want  credentials,  you  must 
apply  to  the  police." 

"But,  Herr  Legationsrat,"  I  persisted,  "there  can 
be  no  objection  to  your  giving  me  something  which  will 
insure  me  ordinary  safety  at  such  a  time  as  this.  After 
all,  I'm  an  American." 

With  a  shrug  of  the  shoulders  and  outflung  arms,  a 
German  gesture  expressing  indifference  or  helpless- 
ness, or  both,  Heilbron  observed,  sardonically:  "For 
us  you  are  a  Daily  Mail  man — nothing  else.  You  are 
known  everywhere  as  such.  Certainly  if  you  remain 
here,  your  position  will  undoubtedly  be  a  precarious 
one. 

It  was  plain  that  the  ethics  which  impelled  Von  Beth- 
mann  Hollweg  to  tear  up  the  Belgian  "scrap  of  paper" 
— brazen  disregard  of  pledges — were  now  being  pur- 
sued in  my  very  insignificant  case.  The  German  For- 
eign Secretary  had  given  a  formal  undertaking,  as  I 
understood  it,  as  to  the  inviolability  of  my  personal 
and  professional  status  as  an  American  newspaper 
man.  Not  five  minutes  before,  I  had  been  assured 
by  an  official  of  the  German  Foreign  Office  in  the 
Foreign  Office  that  the  latter  was  fully  aware  of 
the  arrangements  which  Mr.  Gerard  had  effected 
in  my  favor.  And  now  another  official  calmly 
denied  its  existence,  and,  moreover,  declared  in  sub- 
stance that  a  United  States  passport  calling  upon  the 
friendly  German  Government  "to  permit  Frederic 
William  Wile  safely  and  freely  to  pass,  and,  in  case 


LTHE   LAST   FAREWELL  161 

of  need,  to  give  him  all  lawful  aid  and  protection," 
was  not  worth  the  parchment  on  which  it  was  en- 
graved. International  law  was  being  refashioned  in 
Berlin  in  a  hurry. 

Once  again  I  was  compelled  to  flee  to  the  American 
Ambassador  for  protection — reluctantly  enough,  for  I 
had  already  usurped  far  more  of  his  time  than  one 
citizen  is  entitled  to.  I  told  him  that  the  German  For- 
eign Office  was  trying  to  convert  me  into  a  man 
without  a  country;  not  only  that,  but  that  its  cheerful 
intimation  as  to  my  "position"  being  "undoubtedly 
precarious"  rang  clearly  ominous  in  my  ears.  The 
Ambassador  shared  that  view.  He  was  of  the  opin- 
ion, when  he  saw  me  earlier  in  the  day,  that  my  alarm 
was  unwarranted.  From  what  other  American  news- 
paper men  had  meantime  reported,  my  fears  seemed 
to  be  justified.  He  agreed  that  it  was  best  that  I  should 
go — but  how?  The  town  was  already  choked  with 
Americans  waiting  to  "go."  If  it  were  impossible  to 
move  any  of  them  across  the  frontier,  what  possible 
chance  was  there  of  exporting  me?  There  was,  of 
course,  just  one  chance  that  I  could  think  of — to  leave 
next  day  with  the  British  Embassy.  The  Ambassador 
suggested  that  I  should  ask  Sir  Edward  Goschen  if  he 
would  take  me,  along  with  the  purely  British  corre- 
spondents, who,  I  learned,  were  going  in  his  train. 

So  now,  the  United  States  having  obviously  ex- 
hausted its  powers  on  my  behalf,  I  threw  myself  on  the 
mercies  of  His  Britannic  Majesty.  I  found  Sir  Edward 
Goschen  unhesitatingly  responsive  to  my  request,  on 
the  important  condition  that  the  German  authorities 
would  permit  a  non-Englishman  to  accompany  a  safe- 
conduct  party  of  British  subjects  of    highly    official 


162  ?HE   ASSAULT] 

character!  Once  again  the  gates  leading  out  of  Ger- 
many seemed  barred  to  me,  for  my  status  at  the  Ger- 
man Foreign  Office,  as  the  afternoon  had  established, 
was  not  exactly  that  of  a  persona  grata  who  had  but 
to  ask  a  favor  to  have  it  granted.  But,  by  an  act 
of  Providence,  as  it  then  and  always  since  has  seemed 
to  me,  Ambassador  Gerard  strolled  into  the  lobby  of 
the  British  Embassy  while  I  was  in  the  midst  of  con- 
versation with  Sir  Edward  Goschen.  The  British  Am- 
bassador repeated  the  conditions  on  which  he  would 
gladly  rescue  me — the  assent  of  the  German  Govern- 
ment— whereupon  Mr.  Gerard  quietly  remarked  that 
he  would  "look  after  that."  He  had  little  notion,  I 
suppose,  of  the  herculean  effort  which  would  be  neces- 
sary to  give  effect  to  his  words. 

It  was  now  past  six  o'clock.  The  British  Embassy 
train  was  timed  to  leave  Berlin  at  seven  next  morning, 
Thursday,  August  6.  If  anything  was  going  to  be 
done  for  me,  all  concerned  realized  that  it  would  have 
to  be  done  soon.  "Go  home,  pack  up  all  you  can  jam 
into  two  suit-cases,  and  turn  up  at  the  American  Em- 
bassy at  nine  o'clock,"  said  Gerard. 

No  home  was  ever  deserted,  I  am  sure,  more  re- 
luctantly or  so  precipitately  as  my  little  menage  in 
Wilmersdorf.  It  seemed  a  woefully  inglorious  ending 
to  thirteen  very  happy  and  fruitful  years  in  Berlin.  I 
thanked  Heaven  that  my  wife  and  little  boy  were  not 
there  to  be  evicted  with  me.  A  woman's  attachment 
to  the  things  which  have  spelled  home — the  books,  the 
pictures,  the  thousand  and  one  household  trinkets,  en- 
shrined with  priceless  value  to  those  who  have  accumu- 
lated them — is  far  stronger  than  a  man's.  The  wrench 
of  separation  would  have  been  correspondingly  harder 


THE   LAST    FAREWELL  163 

to  bear.  In  the  midst  of  such  reveries,  sandwiched  be- 
tween selecting  the  most  essential  contents  for  the  two 
suit-cases  to  which  I  was  limited,  I  had  a  caller. 

"Herr  Direktor  Kretschmar,  of  the  Hotel  Adlon, 
has  come  to  see  you,"  announced  Fr'dulein. 

Kretschmar  is  probably  known  to  more  American 
travelers  to  Europe  than  any  other  hotel  man  on 
the  Continent.  The  Adlon  had  been  Yankee  head- 
quarters in  Berlin  ever  since  its  opening  in  the  autumn 
of  1907.  Old  man  Adlon,  its  genial  founder  and  pro- 
prietor, he  of  the  arc-light  face  at  midnight,  after  a 
liberal  evening's  libations  o'er  the  flowing  bowl,  used 
to  be  fond  of  assuring  people  that  "mein  lieber  Freund 
Wile"  had  "made"  the  Adlon.  If  telling  people  that 
the  Adlon  was  the  best  hotel  in  Berlin,  and  reporting  in 
my  American  dispatches,  as  necessity  required,  that 
Governor  Herrick,  Mr.  Carnegie,  Mr.  Schwab,  Doctor 
David  Jayne  Hill,  Vice-President  Fairbanks,  Theo- 
dore P.  Shonts,  John  Hays  Hammond,  Otto  H.  Kahn 
or  some  other  famous  fellow  citizen  was  lodged  in  the 
marble  and  bronze  caravansary  at  the  head  of  Unter 
den  Linden — if  this  "made"  the  Adlon — I  plead  guilty 
to  Herr  Adlon's  charge.  I  shall  never  do  it  again.  I 
divined  at  once  the  object  of  the  curly-haired  Kretsch- 
mar's  visit.  Having  graduated,  I  believe,  like  many 
eminent  German  hotel  keepers,  from  the  humble  ranks 
of  hall-porters  and  head  waiters,  he  was  a  past  master 
in  obsequious  servility.  Many  a  time  I  had  seen  him 
bow  and  scrape  like  a  grinning  flunky  as  he  welcomed 
the  arriving  or  sped  the  parting  guest  at  the  Adlon, 
but  never  was  he  so  cringing  a  Kretschmar  as  he  stood 
before  me  now.  He  got  down  to  business  without 
delay. 


164  THE   ASSAULT, 

There  had  been  a  "terrible  mistake"  at  the  hotel  the 
night  before.  He  was  there  to  offer  the  "deepest  re- 
gret" of  both  the  elder  and  junior  Herren  Adlon  that 
their  "best  friend"  should  have  been  the  victim  of 
"such  an  outrage"  on  their  premises.  They  had  dis- 
missed no  less  than  ten  members  of  the  hotel  staff  for 
complicity  in  my  arrest.  The  Adlon  hoped,  from  the 
bottom  of  its  unoffending  heart,  that  I  would  "forgive 
and  forget."  Kretschmar,  at  this  point  in  his  peccavi, 
almost  broke  down.  He  was  in  tears,  and,  if  I  had 
let  him,  he  would  probably  have  gone  down  on  his 
knees.  If  I  had  known  what  I  was  told  next  day  as 
to  his  own  connection  with  my  experience  at  the  Ad- 
lon, he  would  not  only  have  gone  down  on  his  knees, 
but  down  the  stairs  of  my  flat-building  as  well. 
Whether  it  was  he  who  incited  the  page-boys,  desk- 
clerks,  elevator-men,  chambermaids  and  waiters  to  re- 
gard me  as  an  "English  spy"  I  can  not  say,  but,  in 
light  of  the  experience  which  a  colleague,  Alexander 
Muirhead,  a  London  newspaper-photographer,  had  in 
the  Adlon  shortly  after  my  arrest,  there  is  at  least 
ground  to  fear  that  Kretschmar  may  have  been  some- 
thing more  than  an  innocent  bystander. 

"When  I  asked  for  you  at  the  desk,"  Muirhead  told 
me,  "a  supercilious  clerk,  eying  me  fiercely,  referred 
me  to  the  manager,  whereupon  I  was  escorted  into 
Kretschmar's  room.  T've  come  to  see  my  friend 
Wile/  I  explained.  'Your  friend  Wile's  a  spy !'  snarled 
Kretschmar,  who  seemed  beside  himself  with  fury. 
'And  he's  now  where  he  ought  to  be !  As  for  you,  mein 
Herr,  stand  there  against  the  wall,  hold  up  your  arms, 
and  be  searched  for  weapons.  For  all  we  know,  you're 
a  spy,  too !'     The  mere  thought  of  your  name  appeared 


THE   LAST    FAREWELL  165 

to  fill  Kretschmar  with  incontrollable  rage.  Having 
satisfied  himself  that  I  had  nothing  more  explosive 
about  me  than  some  undeveloped  films,  he  allowed  me 
to  go  my  way  amid  incoherent  mutterings  and  impre- 
cations about  that  ' of  a spy,  Wile.'    I  was, 

of  course,  completely  mystified  by  this  extraordinary 
episode,  as  I  was  at  that  time  entirely  ignorant  of  your 
fate." 

Muirhead  is  a  plain-spoken  Scotchman,  as  well  as 
one  of  Europe's  bravest  and  most  famous  "camera 
men,"  and  although  the  lachrymose  Kretschmar  indig- 
nantly repudiates  the  occurrence,  I  hope  he  will  not 
mind  if  I  prefer  to  believe  Muirhead.  The  manager  of 
the  Adlon  still  keeps  my  memory  green.  Periodically 
during  the  war,  whenever  some  German  paper  has  out- 
done itself  in  dignifying  me  with  vile  abuse,  Kretsch- 
mar has  faithfully  marked  it  in  blue  pencil  and  sent  it 
to  me  by  two  routes — Switzerland  and  Holland — to 
make  sure  that  it  reached  me.  As  I  have  not  taken  the 
trouble  to  acknowledge  these  little  tokens  of  his  abid- 
ing interest,  I  hope  he  may  learn  from  these  pages  that 
they  have  been  duly  received  and  fill  not  the  least  con- 
spicuous niche  in  my  chamber  of  German  war  horrors. 

A  weepy  good-by  scene  with  Fraulein,  a  parting,  lin- 
gering look  around  my  beloved  Arbeitszimmer — so 
soon  to  be  ransacked  by  the  German  police — an  un- 
dying vow  from  the  little  woman  to  guard  our  Lares 
and  Penates  as  if  they  were  her  own  last  earthly  pos- 
sessions, and  all  was  at  an  end,  so  far  as  my  habitat 
in  Berlin  was  concerned.  It  has  not  been  my  privi- 
lege to  say  farewell  to  fireside  and  dear  ones  and  then 
leave  for  the  front  in  field-gray  or  khaki,  but  no  sol- 
dier-man anywhere  in  this  war  has  torn  himself  away 


166  THE   ASSAULT 

from  home  ties  more  sorrowfully  than  I  turned  my 
back  in  the  gathering  dusk  of  August  5,  1914,  on  dear 
old  Helmstedter-strasse.  Instinctively  I  felt  that  I 
should  never  see  it  again,  and  my  heart  was  heavy. 

"What's  Baron  von  Stumm  got  against  you?"  asked 
Second  Secretary  Harvey,  smilingly,  at  the  American 
Embassy,  when  I  arrived,  bag  and  baggage,  at  nine 
o'clock.  "He  says  you're  not  an  American."  Stumm 
was  the  chief  of  the  Anglo-American  section  of  the 
German  Foreign  Office.  He  knew  perfectly  well  that 
I  am  an  American.  He  had  entertained  me  at  his  own 
table  in  May,  1910,  when  he  gave  a  luncheon-party  in 
honor  of  the  American  newspaper  correspondents  sta- 
tioned in  Berlin  and  those  traveling  with  Mr.  Roose- 
velt on  the  occasion  of  the  Colonel's  visit  to  the  Kaiser. 
Stumm  had  "nothing  against  me"  in  June,  I  explained 
to  Harvey,  because  of  his  own  sweet  volition  he  dis- 
tinguished me  with  a  call  at  my  hotel  during  Kiel  Re- 
gatta. I  could  not  imagine  what  had  suddenly  come 
over  the  scion  of  the  humble  Westphalian  blacksmith's 
house,  which  was  one  of  the  first  of  the  nouveau  riche 
German  industrial  tribes  to  be  ennobled.  I  could  only 
think  that,  like  the  Berlin  police,  Legationsrat  Heil- 
bron,  Herr  Direktor  Kretschmar  and  nearly  all  other 
Germans,  Stumm  had  temporarily  gone  mad.  If  I 
was  "not  an  American,"  it  had  taken  the  Imperial 
German  Foreign  Office  thirteen  years  to  make  the  dis- 
covery. Some  day  I  am  going  to  send  Stumm  a  Christ- 
mas card.  It  will  be  embellished  with  a  gilded  birth- 
certificate  attested  by  the  clerk  of  the  County  of  La 
Porte,  Indiana. 

No  one  supplied  me  with  the  details  of  the  final 


THE   LAST    FAREWELL  167 

negotiations  which  were  necessary  to  induce  the 
German  Government  graciously  to  consent  to  permit 
me  to  leave  Germany  alive.  I  have  since  learned 
that  my  pass  was  not  secured  without  some  extremely 
forcible  remonstrances  and  representations.  Stumm 
had  denounced  me  as  a  "scoundrel"  and  in  other 
knightly  terms.  Why  the  German  Foreign  Office  so  ar- 
dently desired  to  prevent  my  departure,  after  having 
earlier  in  the  same  day  declined  to  promise  me  im- 
munity from  physical  harm,  is  a  mystery  which  I  trust 
it  may  some  day  elucidate.  To  fathom  it  is  beyond 
my  own  feeble  powers  of  divination,  and  in  this  nar- 
rative of  farewell  tribulations  in  the  Fatherland,  I 
have  confined  myself  strictly  to  facts.  I  have  reso- 
lutely not  yielded  to  the  temptation  to  surmise.  But  as 
the  official  Genesis  of  Armageddon  is  not  likely  to 
honor  me  with  mention,  I  have  presumed  to  set  forth 
my  own  diminutive  part  in  it  with  perhaps  a  tiring 
superfluity  of  detail.  I  have  the  more  eagerly  ven- 
tured to  do  so  because  grotesque  versions  of  the 
"terms"  on  which  I,  an  American  citizen,  if  you  please, 
"secured  permission  to  leave  Germany,"  have  been, 
and  still  are,  for  all  I  know,  in  circulation  in  Berlin. 
They  are  believed — and  that  is  the  one  saddening 
thought  they  inspire  in  me — by  people  who  were  once 
my  friends,  among  them  Americans  who  place  bread- 
and-butter  business  necessities  and  social  expedi- 
ency in  Germany  above  the  elementary  dictates  of 
gratitude  and  personal  loyalty,  which  are  traits  one 
encounters  even  in  a  Dachshund.  It  is  these  insuffer- 
able lickers  of  German  bootheels  who  "have  heard" 
that  I  "gave  my  word  of  honor"  to  seal  my  lips  forever 
"about  Germany,"  to  "go  back  to  the  United  States  at 


168  THE   ASSAULT, 

once"  (perhaps  as  press-agent  to  Dernburg,  who  was 
also  leaving  Germany),  to  "renounce  all  connection 
with  English  journalism,"  and  other  pledges  of  equally 
imbecilic  character.  The  only  "broken  pledge"  which 
the  rumor-mongers  did  not  foist  upon  me  was  an  out- 
right agreement  to  join  Germany's  army  of  kept  jour- 
nalists. I  should  have  been  better  off,  financially  no 
doubt,  if  I  had  enlisted  in  that  immaculate  service, 
which  is  one  of  the  best  paid  in  the  world. 

My  permit  to  leave  Germany,  Harvey  said,  would 
be  issued  during  the  night  and  be  handed  me  next 
morning  at  the  British  Embassy.  Meantime,  evidently 
to  make  assurance  doubly  sure,  Ambassador  Gerard 
gave  me  in  his  own  handwriting  an  attest  that  I  was 
leaving  the  country  with  Sir  Edward  Goschen.  He 
affixed  to  it  the  great  seal  of  the  Embassy,  handed  me 
the  note  with  a  merry  "Good  luck,"  I  wrung  his  hand 
in  a  last  grip  of  gratitude  and  good-by,  and  we  parted 
company. 

Meantime  I  had  opened  negotiations  with  the  Em- 
bassy porter  to  pass  the  night  on  a  cot  in  his  lodge, 
where  Tower  had  bunked  after  our  arrest,  and  ar- 
ranged with  him  to  call  me  at  four-thirty,  so  that  I  could 
be  at  the  British  Embassy  well  before  six  o'clock.  While 
I  was  chatting  in  the  hallway,  Mrs.  Gerard  came  along. 
"Where  are  you  going  to  sleep  to-night?"  she  inquired, 
solicitously.  I  told  her.  She  would  not  hear  of  my 
lodging  plans  in  the  porter's  basement.  There  were 
half-a-dozen  bedrooms  in  the  Embassy,  and  I  must 
use  one  of  them.  Then  she  hustled  away,  in  the  most 
motherly  fashion,  to  prepare  for  me  what  turned  out 
to  be  a  suite-de-luxe.    My  last  night  in  Germany  was 


THE    LAST    FAREWELL 


169 


EMBASSY  OF   THE 
UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


fia^iU  ,v^en**~.        *****      ci^% 


fLt'e4+fZ^ 


Ambassador  Gerard's  Note 


170  JHE   ASSAULT, 

slept  on  "American  soil."  It  was  not  the  most  restful 
night  I  have  spent  in  my  life,  but  it  lingers  as  the 
sweetest  memory  I  cherish  among  a  myriad  of  recollec- 
tions which  crowded  thick  one  upon  another  in  that 
great  wild  week  in  Berlin.  "And  do  you  like  your 
breakfast  eggs  boiled  three  or  four  minutes?"  was  the 
cheery  "Good  night"  and  Auf  Wiedersehen  I  had  from 
"Molly"  Gerard. 

At  least  one  German,  in  addition  to  my  secretary 
and  governess,  who  were  models  of  devotion  to  the 
last,  took  the  trouble  to  show  me  a  parting  mark  of 
esteem.  He  was  a  colleague,  Paul  R.  Krause,  of  the 
Lokal-Anzeiger  staff,  a  son-in-law  of  Field  Marshal 
von  der  Goltz,  and  one  of  the  best  of  fellows.  Krause 
lived  abroad  so  long — his  life  has  been  spent  mostly 
in  Turkey,  South  Africa  and  South  America — that  he 
will  perhaps  not  mind  my  saying  that  he  always  struck 
me  as  effectually  de-Germanized.  At  any  rate,  having 
heard  of  my  plight,  he  came  to  the  Embassy  late  at 
night  to  offer  me  not  only  fraternal  sympathy,  but 
physical  assistance  in  the  form  of  readiness  to  become 
my  "body-guard,"  if  I  really  considered  myself  in  per- 
sonal danger!  He  could  hardly  be  made  to  believe 
that  Heilbron  had  been  "such  an  ass,"  when  I  told  of 
my  parting  interview  in  the  Foreign  Office.  Krause 
and  I  exchanged  Auf  Wiedersehen  in  the  "American 
bar"  of  the  Hotel  Kaiserhof,  round  the  corner  from 
the  Embassy,  where  I  noticed  Doctor  Dernburg,  Au- 
gust Stein,  of  the  Frankfurter  Zeitung,  and  Doctor 
Fuchs,  of  the  Deutsche  Bank,  gathered  dolefully  round 
a  beer-table,  and  amazed,  no  doubt,  to  find  Krause  in 
such  doubtful  company. 

I  did  not  seek  my  downy  couch  in  the  Embassy  until. 


THE   LAST   FAREWELL  171 

I  had  had  a  farewell  promenade  and  visit  with  two 
very  dear  newspaper  pals,  Swing,  of  the  Chicago  Daily 
News j  and  Feibelman,  of  the  New  York  Tribune  and 
London  Express.  Feibleman  was  still  in  the  throes  of 
the  anxiety  from  which  I  was  about  to  be  relieved,  as 
the  Foreign  Office  had  also  refused  him  credentials 
owing  to  his  connection  with  an  English  journal.  He 
sincerely  envied  my  good  fortune  in  being  able  to  escape 
with  the  British  Ambassador.  I  was  glad  to  hear  a 
week  later  that  he  too  had  eventually  contrived,  with 
the  American  Embassy's  assistance,  to  reach  Holland, 
where  he  has  done  excellent  work  for  his  paper  during 
the  war.  Swing,  Feibelman  and  I,  arm-locked,  walked 
the  silent  streets  around  and  about  the  Embassy  until 
long  past  midnight,  speculating  as  to  what  the  red- 
clotted  future  had  in  store  for  each  of  us,  embittered  at 
Fate  for  so  ruthlessly  disrupting  friendships  of  affec- 
tionate intimacy,  and  wondering,  when  all  was  over, 
if  it  ever  would  be,  whether  Berlin  or  Kamchatka 
would  be  the  scene  of  our  next  reunion.    .    .    . 

Something  told  me  that  even  a  twelfth-hour  attempt 
might  be  made  to  hamper  my  get-away,  so,  as  a  "posi- 
tively last  farewell"  favor  I  asked  "Joe"  Grew,  my 
rescuer  from  the  police,  to  escort  me  to  the  train. 
Though  it  meant  his  tumbling  out  of  bed  at  the  unro- 
mantic  hour  of  five,  his  breezy  "Sure,  I  will"  set  my 
mind  completely  at  rest.  He  arrived  at  the  appointed 
minute.  The  sight  of  the  Stars  and  Stripes  flapping  at 
the  front  of  his  car  was  a  reassuring  little  picture. 
They  had  meant  much  to  me  during  the  preceding 
forty-eight  hours.  At  the  British  Embassy,  which 
looked  more  like  a  baggage-room  or  express-office 
struck  by  lightning,  with  the  floors  littered  indiscrim- 


172  THE   ASSAULT 

inately  with  hastily-packed  boxes  of  documents  and 
records,  trunks,  suit-cases,  golf -bags  and  batches  of 
clothing  hastily  slung  or  strapped  into  or  around  trav- 
eling-rugs— and  all  the  other  indescribable  impedi- 
menta of  a  suddenly- retreating  army  or  an  evicted 
family — I  found  my  German  pass  awaiting  me.  It  had 
been  delivered  to  Godfrey  Thomas,  one  of  Sir  Edward 
Goschen's  able  young  attaches,  all  of  whom,  like  the 
Ambassador  himself,  had  given  so  characteristic  an  ex- 
hibition of  British  imperturbability  during  the  final 
hours  of  crisis.  The  pass  described  me  as  "the  English 
newspaper  correspondent,  Wile."  It  is  reproduced  op- 
posite this  page.  I  treasure  it  with  the  same  pride 
which  probably  inspires  a  reprieved  man  to  cherish  the 
document  which  cheats  the  hangman. 

There  was  no  guard  of  honor  to  bid  Sir  Edward 
Goschen  and  his  staff  Godspeed  from  the  Wilhelm- 
strasse.  No  single  German  was  so  poor  as  to  do  them 
reverence  except  a  couple  of  sleepy  policemen  and 
half-a-dozen  blear-eyed,  early-rising  Berliners  on  their 
way  to  work.  None  of  them  had  yet  learned  to  say 
Gott  strafe  England,  so  the  lonely  cavalcade  of  lug- 
gage-laden taxis,  which  were  hauling  Great  Britain's 
official  representatives  on  the  first  stage  of  their  jour- 
ney out  of  the  enemy's  capital,  proceeded  on  its  way 
without  molestation  or  demonstration. 

The  very  day  the  Kaiser's  ambassador  to  England, 
Prince  Lichnowsky,  was  accorded  a  departure  from 
London  amid  honors  customarily  reserved  for  a  ruling 
sovereign.  Great  Britain's  ambassador  to  Germany 
was  leaving  like  a  thief  in  the  night,  the  Imperial  Gov- 
ernment having  requested  him,  when  shaking  the  dust 
of  Berlin  from  his  miscreant  feet,  to  slink  to  the  rail- 


THE   LAST    FAREWELL 


173 


Facsimile  of  the  Pass 


174  THE   ASSAULT. 

way  station  as  inconspicuously  as  possible  and  long 
before  the  righteous  metropolis  waked.  Otherwise,  it 
was  solicitously  suggested,  Kultur,  giving  vent  to  the 
holy  venom  which  now  filled  the  Teutonic  soul,  might 
feel  constrained  to  stone  the  Ambassador  afresh. 
Thus,  I,  too,  chaperoned  by  Grew,  sneaked  out  of 
Berlin. 

My  old  German  teacher  was  right.  She  said  there 
was  no  word  for  "gentleman"  in  the  Kaiser's  language. 
The  fashion  in  which  his  people  went  to  war  with 
England  proved  it. 


(CHAPTER  XII 

SAFE  CONDUCT 

1EHRTER  BAHNHOF,the  gateway  through  which 
j  so  many  American  tourists  have  passed  out 
of  Berlin  en  route  to  Hamburg  or  Bremen  steam- 
ers, was  not  en  fete  in  honor  of  the  departing  Eng* 
lander.  My  memory  traveled  back  irresistibly  to  the 
last  time  the  British  Embassy  in  force  was  assembled 
there — to  greet  King  George  and  Queen  Mary  when 
they  arrived  to  visit  the  German  Court  in  May,  1913. 
The  rafters  rang  on  that  occasion  with  the  blare  of  a 
Prussian  Guards  band  thundering  God  Save  the  King, 
cousins  George  and  William  embraced  fondly  and 
kissed,  and  the  station  was  swathed  in  the  en- 
twined colors  of  Germany  and  England.  It  was  a 
different  and  forbidding  aspect  which  the  old  brick 
and  steel  barn  of  a  train-shed  presented  this  muggy 
August  morning.  At  every  entrance  sentries  in  gray 
and  policemen  with  Brownings  at  the  belt  stood  guard, 
for  railways  and  stations  were  now  as  integral  a  part 
of  the  war-machine  as  fortresses  and  guns.  Inside,  in- 
fantrymen in  gray  from  head  to  foot — all  Germany 
had  now  grown  gray — carrying  rifles  with  fixed  bayo- 
nets patrolled  the  platforms,  searching  each  Eng- 
lishman, as  he  came  along,  with  glances  mingling 
watchfulness  and  contempt. 

175 


176  THE  ASSAULT, 

Our  band  of  pilgrims,  who  were  to  be  some  forty 
or  fifty  in  all,  arrived  in  detachments,  having,  as  Sir 
Edward  Goschen  himself  officially  described  it,  "been 
smuggled  away  from  the  Embassy  in  taxicabs  by  side 
streets."  The  Ambassador  himself  was  one  of  the  last 
to  turn  up.  No  Imperial  emissary  came  to  wish  him  a 
happy  journey  and  Auf  Wiedersehen,  though  the  For- 
eign Secretary  deputized  young  Count  Wedel  to  say 
good-by  in  his  name.  The  Kaiser's  farewell  greeting 
to  Sir  Edward  was  conveyed  the  day  before,  when  the 
All-Highest  sent  an  adjutant  with  majestic  regrets 
for  the  sacking  of  the  Embassy  premises  on  the 
night  the  war  broke  out.  Of  markedly  less  apologetic 
tenor  was  the  adjutant's  message  that  William  II, 
"now  that  Great  Britain  had  taken  sides  with  other  na- 
tions against  her  old  allies  of  Waterloo,  must  at  once 
divest  himself  of  the  titles  of  British  Field  Marshal 
and  British  Admiral."  The  uniforms,  orders  and  dec- 
orations conferred  on  him  by  Perfidious  Albion  had 
desecrated  the  exalted  person  of  the  supreme  Hohen- 
zollern  for  the  last  time.  In  the  memorable  dispatch 
in  which  he  so  dispassionately  narrated  his  final  hours 
in  Berlin,  Sir  Edward  Goschen  sufficiently  indicated 
the  true  character  of  the  Kaiser's  adieu  by  mentioning 
that  "the  message  lost  none  of  its  acerbity  by  the  man- 
ner of  its  delivery."  As  a  Prussian  officer  was  firing  it 
at  the  official  incarnation  of  Great  Britain,  it  is  not  diffi- 
cult to  imagine  the  mien  and  tone  of  the  proud  func- 
tionary on  whom  had  been  conferred  the  historic 
distinction  of  breathing  Hate  in  the  face  of  the  foe  at 
that  cataclysmic  hour. 

I  shall  always  hold  it  a  privilege  to  have  been  in  con- 
tact with  Sir  Edward  Goschen  during  the  days  which 


SAFE   CONDUCT  177, 

preceded  the  war  and  in  the  hours  of  its  beginning. 
He  was  throughout  an  object-lesson  in  imperturba- 
bility. In  the  midst  of  his  holidays  in  England  when 
the  crisis  arose,  having  left  Kiel  early  in  July  with  the 
British  squadron,  he  returned  hurriedly  to  his  post  in 
Berlin  just  before  the  match  was  applied  to  the  powder- 
barrel.  I  recall  distinctly  the  invincible  state  of  his 
good  humor  when  I  visited  him  at  the  Embassy  on 
July  31,  only  an  hour  or  two  before  the  Kaiser  de- 
clared Germany  to  be  in  "a  state  of  war." 

"Wile,"  he  remarked,  fastening  upon  me  a  gaze 
which  very  successfully  simulated  vexation,  "what  did 
you  mean  by  libeling  me  in  that  dispatch  of  yours 
from  Kiel  on  the  Kaiser's  visit  to  our  flagship?  You 
had  the  effrontery  to  suggest  that  I  was  lolling  about 
the  quarter-deck  in  a  tweed  suit.  I  would  have  you 
understand  that  my  costume  afloat  is  always  the  regu- 
lation navy-blue!" 

I  pleaded  color-blindness.  I  said  that  from  our 
perch  behind  the  thirteen-and-one-half-inch  gun  tur- 
ret for'd,  it  looked  to  me  as  if  His  Excellency  had  actu- 
ally worn  tweed. 

"Well,  I  didn't,"  he  insisted,  "and  you  caused  me  to 
be  twitted  not  a  little  in  London  for  my  apparent  ig- 
norance of  battleship  etiquette." 

Sir  Edward  Goschen,  unlike  other  British  Ambas- 
sadors I  knew  in  Berlin,  was  never  at  any  moment  of 
his  career  there  under  any  delusions  as  to  the  leitmotif 
of  German  policy  toward  Great  Britain.  No  Teutonic 
wool  was  ever  pulled  over  his  eyes.  During  the  week 
of  tension  which  ended  with  war,  he  bore  himself  with 
tact  and  firmness  characteristic  of  the  highest  diplo- 
matic traditions.    Though  never  surrendering  a  posi- 


178  JHE   ASSAULT 

tion  in  the  trying  negotiations  with  the  Kaiser's  Gov- 
ernment, the  Ambassador  did  not  cease,  up  to  the  hour 
when  he  asked  for  his  passports,  to  labor  for  such 
peace  as  would  be  consistent  with  British  interests.  It 
is  not  customary  in  the  British  service,  I  believe,  to 
send  a  diplomatic  official  back  to  a  country  with  which 
England  has  meantime  been  at  war,  but  Sir  Edward 
Goschen  could  return  to  Berlin  with  his  head  high, 
enjoying  not  only,  I  am  sure,  the  limitless  confidence 
of  his  own  Government,  but  the  unalloyed  respect  of 
Germany,  as  well. 

Our  party  having  been  politely  herded  into  the  royal 
waiting-room  of  the  station,  a  couple  of  silk-hatted 
and  frock-coated  young  Foreign  Office  officials  now 
buzzed  busily  about  us,  checking  off  our  respective 
names  and  identities  on  their  duplicate  lists,  lest  no  un- 
authorized Engl'dnder  should  escape  through  the  ring 
of  steel  drawn  tight  around  Germany's  frontiers.  Our 
safe-conduct  train  had  now  pulled  in.  We  found 
ourselves  a  somewhat  indiscriminate  collection  of 
refugees.  Besides  Sir  Edward  Goschen,  there  was,  of 
course,  the  full  embassy  family  of  secretaries,  attaches, 
clerks,  the  wives  of  one  or  two  of  them,  and  one 
bonnie  group  of  babes  with  their  blue-and-white 
"nannies."  Sir  Horace  Rumbold,  the  Counselor  of 
the  Embassy,  who  had  conducted  the  initial  negotia- 
tions with  Germany,  monocled  and  unruffled,  was  as 
calm  as  if  he  were  starting  off  for  a  week-end  in  the 
country.  Captain  Henderson,  the  Naval  Attache,  and 
a  prince  of  sailormen,  had  no  inkling  of  the  undying 
discomfiture  soon  to  be  his,  as  an  ingloriously  in- 
terned captive  in  neutral  Holland,  for  his  first  assign- 
ment from  the  Admiralty  was  to  command  a  detach- 


SAFE    CONDUCT  179 

ment  of  the  ill-starred  naval  expedition  to  Antwerp. 
Colonel  Russell,  the  Military  Attache,  was  quitting 
German  soil  with  emotions  a  little  different  from 
those  of  the  rest  of  us,  for  he  had  seen  the  light 
of  day  at  Potsdam  in  1874,  while  his  late  father, 
Lord  Ampthill,  was  British  Ambassador  to  Germany. 
It  was  only  a  few  weeks  previous  that  the  colo- 
nel's own  Berlin-born  son  had  been  christened 
"William"  under  the  august  Godfatherhood  of  the 
Kaiser,  who  sent  the  babe  a  golden  cup  emblazoned 
with  the  Hohenzollern  arms.  With  us,  too,  were 
Messrs.  Gurney,  Rattigan,  Monck,  Thomas  and  Astell, 
Sir  Edward  Goschen's  able  staff  of  secretaries  and 
young  attaches,  who  had  all  "sat  tight,"  in  their  British 
way,  so  splendidly  during  the  preceding  forty-eight 
hours.  The  official  party  also  included  the  British  Min- 
ister to  Saxony,  Mr.  Grant-Duff,  and  Lady  Grant- 
Duff,  whose  windows  in  Dresden  had  been  broken,  too, 
and  Messrs.  Charlton  and  Turner  of  the  Berlin  and 
Leipzig  consulates,  respectively. 

The  journalist-refugees  consisted  of  Mackenzie  and 
Jelf  of  The  Times,  Tower  and  Nevinson  of  The  Daily 
News,  Long  of  The  Westminster  Gazette,  Lawrence 
of  Reuter's  Agency,  Byles  of  The  Standard,  Dudley 
Ward,  of  the  Manchester  Guardian  and  his  newly-wed 
German  wife,  and  Muirhead,  the  "camera  man"  of  The 
Daily  Chronicle.  Poor  Jelf,  who  enlisted  within  a 
week  after  his  arrival  in  England,  was  killed  in  action 
during  the  great  offensive  fighting  in  Artois,  in  Sep- 
tember, 1915.  Among  the  others  whom  Sir  Edward 
Goschen  had  rescued  from  the  maws  of  Hate  was  a 
little  Australian  woman,  Mrs.  Gunderson,  trapped  in 
Germany  with  her  husband  at  the  outbreak  of  war. 


180'  THE   ASSAULT 

They  had  journeyed  around  the  world  on  their  honey- 
moon to  enable  him  to  participate  in  an  international 
chess  match  at  Mannheim.  He  has  been  stalemated 
ever  since  at  the  British  concentration  camp  at  Ruhle- 
ben — Berlin.  Then  there  was  an  estimable  old  English 
couple  who  had  spent  a  night  in  jail  on  the  charge  of 
being  "spies"  prowling  about  the  German  countryside 
in  their  touring-car.  They  were  not  bemoaning  the 
loss  of  their  automobile  in  the  presence  of  their  own 
escape  and  that  of  their  chauffeur.  One  of  the  luckiest 
of  our  traveling  companions  was  Captain  Deedes,  a 
British  army  officer  who  was  passing  through  Ger- 
many on  his  way  home  from  service  in  Turkey,  and 
just  gained  the  precincts  of  the  British  Embassy 
before  being  nabbed  by  the  police.  We  shuddered  to 
think  of  the  fate  of  Captain  Holland  of  the  British 
navy,  also  en  route  from  Constantinople,  who  had  not 
been  so  fortunate,  and  was  now  locked  up  at  Spandau. 
I  was  the  sole  and  lonely  American  member  of  the 
caravan. 

The  Germans  provided  Sir  Edward  Goschen  with 
a  "corridor  train"  of  first-class  cars,  including  "sa- 
loon carriages,"  which  are  a  combination  of  parlor 
and  sleeping  cars,  for  himself  and  his  immediate  en- 
tourage, and  for  Baron  Beyens,  the  Belgian  Minister 
to  Berlin,  and  his  staff,  who,  appropriately  enough, 
were  conducted  to  the  frontier  along  with  the  Brit- 
ish. Baron  Beyens  has  contributed  to  the  genesis  of 
the  war  not  the  least  noteworthy  evidence  of  Ger- 
many's felonious  designs  on  European  liberties  and 
peace.  As  has  been  revealed  by  a  Belgian  Grey  Book, 
the  Baron  was  able  to  report  to  his  government  as  early 
as  July  26  that  "the  German  General  Staff  regarded 


^OP 


X  O 


ffi    Xi 


SAFE    CONDUCT  181' 

war  as  inevitable  and  near,  and  expected  success  on  ac- 
count of  Germany's  superiority  in  heavy  guns  and  the 
unpreparedness  of  Russia."  Baron  Beyens  also  de- 
scribed his  final  and  dramatic  conversation  with  the 
German  Foreign  Secretary,  who  "announced  with 
pain"  Germany's  determination  to  violate  Belgian  neu- 
trality, and  asked  to  be  allowed  to  occupy  Liege.  The 
request  was  refused,  Herr  von  Jagow  admitting  to  the 
Minister  that  no  other  answer  was  possible.  The  Bel- 
gians had  another  "answer"  up  their  sleeve,  though 
von  Jagow  knew  it  not.  It  was  the  shambles  into 
which  the  flower  of  the  German  Guard  plunged  at 
Liege  a  week  later. 

Lieutenant-Colonel  von  Buttlar,  a  dapper  little  gray- 
haired  Prussian  officer  with  a  Kaiser  mustache  and 
a  heel-clicking  manner,  presently  approached  Sir  Ed- 
ward Goschen,  saluted,  introduced  himself  as  the  mili- 
tary chaperon  of  the  party,  and  invited  us  to  troop 
into  the  train.  An  armed  guard,  a  strapping  infantry- 
man with  glistening  bayonet  affixed  to  his  shouldered 
rifle,  was  already  aboard.  He  turned  out,  as  did  the 
lieutenant-colonel  himself,  to  be  a  very  harmless  war- 
den. When  the  Oberstleutnant,  gloved  and  helmeted 
as  if  on  dress  parade,  was  not  snoozing  or  reading 
during  the  journey,  he  merely  hovered  about,  mother- 
like, to  see  that  his  charges  were  comfortable,  as 
well  as  not  up  to  mischief.  In  addition  to  the  or- 
dinary train-crew,  we  were  shepherded  by  seven  or 
eight  plain-clothes  Prussian  detectives,  whom  even  the 
ruse  of  regulation  railway-caps  could  not  disguise.  You 
can  tell  a  German  "secret  policeman,"  as  he  is  idio- 
matically called,  at  least  a  mile  off.  He  is  the  last  word 
,in  palpability. 


182  JHE   ASSAULT 

Our  destination,  we  learned,  was  the  Hook  of  Hol- 
land, where  either  a  Great  Eastern  steamer  or  a  Brit- 
ish cruiser  would  pick  us  up.  We  were  to  travel  via 
Hanover-Osnabruck  to  Amsterdam  and  thence  to  the 
sea.  Mackenzie,  Jelf  and  I,  having  preempted  a  com- 
partment, settled  down  at  the  windows  for  a  last  long 
look  at  Berlin  as  the  train  now  tugged  slowly  out  of  the 
station,  a  few  minutes  past  eight  o'clock.  Speaking 
for  myself,  I  am  quite  sure  that  railway  trucks  never 
rattled  with  such  sweet  melody  as  those  beneath  us 
were  producing,  for  with  every  chug  they  were  bring- 
ing us  nearer  to  liberty.  I  remember  a  distinct  feeling 
of  consciousness  that  I  should  not  consider  myself  an 
utterly  freed  felon  until  German  territory  was  actually 
no  longer  under  my  feet.  It  was  an  indescribably 
gratifying  sensation,  all  sufficient  for  the  moment,  to 
realize  that  Berlin  at  least  was  fading  into  oblivion. 
Whether  any  of  my  British  colleagues  were  throbbing 
with  similar  emotions,  I  never  knew.  It  is  un-English, 
I  believe,  to  reveal  emotions  even  if  one  is  battling  with 
them.  Whatever  thoughts  were  in  their  minds,  I 
myself  was  obsessed  with  a  distinct  desire,  at  that  mo- 
ment, to  blot  Berlin  from  my  mind  for  all  eternity. 
Perhaps,  as  I  thus  soliloquized,  I  was  giving  way  un- 
consciously to  a  passing  spell  of  that  unreasoning 
malice  which  infested  hate-maddened  Berlin.  I  sup- 
pose I  ought  to  have  shed  briny  tears,  as  we  skirted 
Spandau  and  sped  across  the  dreary  plain  of  the  Mark 
of  Brandenburg,  and  familiar  landmarks  passed  from 
view.  Certainly  in  the  long  ago,  I  had  firmly  made  up 
my  mind  that  when  my  time  to  leave  Germany  came 
I  should  go  away  with  genuine  regret.  Life  in  the 
Fatherland  had  meant  much  to  me  and  mine.     Al- 


SAFE    CONDUCT  183 

though  I  never  adopted  it,  like  Lord  Haldane,  as  my 
"spiritual  home,"  a  man  can  not  spend  thirteen  years 
of  middle  life  in  the  same  community,  however  alien 
to  its  spirit  and  institutions,  without  forming  deep- 
rooted  attachments.  But  the  circumstances  which  pre- 
cipitated me  out  of  Germany  conspired,  I  fear,  to 
quench  old-time  affection.  So,  ungrateful  as  it  may 
appear,  my  handkerchief  was  not  brought  into  play 
and  my  eyes  were  uncommonly  dry  as  the  sand-wastes 
of  Brandenburg  vanished  from  our  vision.    .    .    . 

It  was  evident  that  we  were  in  for  a  tedious  jour- 
ney and  that  our  trek  across  Western  Germany  was  to 
be  agony  long  drawn  out.  Berlin  to  Hanover,  the  first 
leg  of  the  trip,  was  one  I  had  accomplished  times  in- 
numerable under  three  hours,  and  even  a  Bummelzug 
hardly  took  longer.  It  was  to  take  us  nearly  three 
times  as  long  to-day.  Mobilization  was  technically 
complete,  but  every  railway  track  in  the  country,  espe- 
cially if  it  fed  the  great  trunk-line  to  the  west  along 
which  we  were  traveling,  was  still  choked  with  troop 
trains.  In  consequence,  though  ours  was  a  "special," 
we  had  to  halt,  back  up,  sidetrack  and  perform  every 
other  gyration  of  which  a  train  is  capable,  whenever 
we  came  up  with  battalions  en  route  toward  one  of  the 
three  frontiers  on  which  German  blood  was  now  being 
spilled.  At  every  station  we  encountered  trainloads 
of  men  in  gray,  singing,  cheering  and  laughing  as  if 
bound  for  a  picnic  instead  of  slaughter.  It  was  always 
they  who  had  the  right  of  way,  for  it  was  soon  borne 
in  upon  us  that  the  meanest  detachment  of  reservists 
bulked  larger  in  Germany's  eye  just  then  than  "the 
whole  bally  British  diplomatic  service  put  together," 
as  Jelf  irreverently  expressed  it.     Never  at  any  time 


184  THE   ASSAULT 

were  we.  doing  anything  dizzier  than  twenty  miles  an 
hour,  and  we  figured  that  if  we  reached  Hanover  by 
dinner-time,  we  should  be  fortunate.  As  to  London, 
which  we  used  to  reach  twenty  hours  after  leaving 
Berlin,  it  became  painfully  obvious  that  it  would  be 
nearer  forty  this  trip. 

But  there  was  much  to  see,  and  to  think  and  talk 
about.  As  we  were  being  held  up  everywhere  along 
the  line  by  seemingly  the  entire  male  population  of  the 
Empire  in  uniform,  it  was  not  surprising,  for  one 
thing,  to  find  the  fields  on  either  side  of  us  as  denuded 
of  men  as  if  Adam  had  never  lived.  None  but  women 
was  discoverable  at  work  on  this  eve  of  harvest,  ex- 
cepting here  and  there  an  old  man,  while  children,  too, 
were  being  pressed  into  service.  At  bridges,  culverts 
and  crossings,  instead  of  the  customary  railway 
guards,  who  used  to  stand  at  salute  with  a  flag  as  a 
train  whirled  past,  there  were  now  soldiers  with 
rifles.  No  restrictions  were  placed  upon  our  recon- 
noitering  the  adjacent  country  as  long  as  we  were  in 
motion;  but  Lieutenant-Colonel  von  Buttlar,  always 
heel-clicking  and  saluting  beforehand,  intimated  to 
Mein  Herren  that  the  curtains  of  their  compartment- 
windows  must  be  drawn  as  the  train  approached  or 
halted  at  stations.  There  was  no  suspicion,  he  begged 
to  assure  us,  that  we  might  attempt  to  practise  espion- 
age about  troop  movements.  On  the  contrary,  the  sug- 
gestion was  a  precaution  recommended  in  our  own  in- 
terests. Unfortunately,  quoth  the  apologetic  colonel, 
it  had  not  been  feasible  to  conceal  the  identity  of  our 
train.  Western  Germany  was  bursting  with  patriotic 
frenzy,  and  it  was  just  within  the  range  of  possibilities 
that  their  exuberance  might  beat  itself  into  disagreea- 


SAFE   CONDUCT  185 

ble  "demonstrations."    Therefore,  discretion  was  ob- 
viously our  cue. 

But  what  we  could  not  see  at  Nauen,  Rathenow, 
Stendal,  Gardelegen,  Obisfelde  and  Lehrte,  we  could 
hear,  for  all  the  inhabitants  of  every  hamlet  and  town 
in  Central  Germany  appeared  to  have  orders  from 
somewhere  to  assemble  at  their  railway-stations  and 
sing  themselves  red  in  the  face  for  Kaiser  and  Em- 
pire. Manifestly  the  Supreme  War  Lord  had  not  only 
called  up  his  armed  legions,  but  mobilized  the  coun- 
try's Singvereine  besides,  and  man,  woman  and  child 
of  them  were  now  in  the  trenches  with  their  throats 
bared  to  the  foe.  I  suppose  they  were  chanting  Die 
Wacht  am  Rhein  and  Deutschland,  Deutschland  iiber 
Alles  in  other  parts  of  Germany,  too,  but  I  have 
often  thought  that  the  country's  most  vociferous  and 
tireless  choral  artists  were  concentrated  on  that  day 
on  the  strategic  line  of  the  British  safe-conduct  train's 
route.  If  the  Great  General  Staff  at  Berlin,  with  that 
incomparable  attention  to  detail  which  is  one  of  its 
vaunted  accomplishments,  schemed  to  send  us  out  of 
Germany  convinced,  by  the  evidence  of  our  own  ears, 
that  the  Kaiser's  people  were  sallying  forth  to  war 
like  Wagnerian  heroes  with  music  and  triumphant 
cheers  on  their  lips,  the  plan  succeeded.  My  own  in- 
delible recollection  of  that  farewell  ride  across  Ger- 
many, at  any  rate,  is  the  memory  of  song.  For  many 
days  and  nights  afterward,  Die  Wacht  am  Rhein 
and  Deutschland,  Deutschland  iiber  Alles,  would  ring 
and  ring  through  my  head.  At  the  time  it  all  seemed 
beautifully  spontaneous,  for  the  Germans  are  a  sing- 
ing folk,  who  put  soul  into  their  anthems,  but  reflec- 
tion makes  me  wonder  if  that  continuous  song-service 


186  THE   ASSAULT 

which  so  mercilessly  accompanied  us  from  Berlin  to 
the  Netherlands  was  not  a  stage-managed  extravaganza 
with  a  motive.  The  Germans  are  a  thorough  race, 
and  in  war  they  overlook  no  opportunity. 

It  was  only  at  times  that  the  singing  was  anything 
else  than  merely  monotonous — the  periodical  occasions 
when,  if  we  halted  longer  than  usual  at  a  station,  the 
singers  would  line  up  alongside  the  train  so  closely 
that  they  could  fairly  shout  in  our  ears.  Then  there 
would  be  a  note  of  ill-mannered  defiance  in  their  song. 
At  Hanover  we  happened  to  be  drawn  up  in  the  station 
at  the  very  moment  when  the  British  Ambassador  and 
the  Belgian  Minister  were  in  the  dining-car,  and  there 
was  a  particularly  vehement  vocal  endurance  competi- 
tion outside  of  the  window  at  which  they  were  sitting. 
But  from  my  own  table  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  car 
I  observed  that  Sir  Edward  Goschen  was  not  visibly 
diverted  from  his  Wiener-Schnitzel,  for,  while  the 
Deutschland,  Deutschland  uber  Alles  was  doing  its 
worst,  he  remarked,  cheerily,  to  his  Belgian  colleague : 
"Rather  fine  singing,  isn't  it  ?" 

Next  to  the  songs  which  knew  no  ending  the  most 
conspicuous  manifestation  of  Furor  Teutonicus  was 
the  chalking  of  troop-trains  with  exuberant  inscriptions 
symbolical  of  expected  great  German  victories  to  come. 
"Special  to  St.  Petersburg"  was  a  prime  favorite. 
"Excursion  to  Paris"  was  extremely  popular.  That, 
we  know,  is  exactly  what  the  War  Party  expected  the 
campaign  to  be.  "Through  Train  to  Moscow"  ran  a 
particularly  sanguine  sentiment  and  "Death  to  the 
Blood-Czar,"  a  more  sanguinary  one.  Then  there 
would  be  rude  caricatures  of  Nicholas  II  or  President 
Poincare  either  at  the  end  of  a  noose  or  of  the  boot  of 


SAFE   CONDUCT  187 

an  equally  rudely-cartooned  Kaiser.  And,  of  course, 
there  were  plenty  of  jests  at  Great  Britain.  "We'll 
soon  be  chewing  roast-beef  in  London"  was  the  way 
one  artist  epitomized  his  hopes.  "Special  Train  to  the 
Peddler-City" — a  shaft  at  London,  the  home  of  the 
"shopkeeper  nation"  which  "organized  war  against 
Germany"  in  order  to  "crush  an  unpleasant  commer- 
cial rival."  "Death  to  our  enviers !"  was  the  language 
in  which  another  Anglophobe  thought  found  expres- 
sion. Beneath  the  British  Ambassador's  car-windows, 
I  was  told,  some  one  had  chalked  a  John  Bull  drooping 
ignominiously  from  the  gallows,  with  "Race-Traitor" 
for  an  epitaph ! 

The  night  was  fitful  for  us  all.  Curled  up  on  the 
seats  of  our  compartments,  such  attempts  at  sleep  as 
we  ventured  were  effectually  defeated  by  Deutsch- 
land,  Deutschland  iiber  Alles  and  Die  Wacht  am 
Rhein.  All  through  the  night  they  were  hurled  at  us. 
At  every  town,  regardless  of  the  hour,  the  choristers 
were  on  the  job.  We  welcomed  our  arrival  at  Bentheim, 
the  final  station  in  Prussia,  at  seven  next  morning,  not 
half  so  eagerly  because  it  was  the  last  of  Germany  as 
because  it  was  the  last  of  Deutschland,  Deutschland 
iiber  Alles  and  Die  Wacht  am  Rhein.  For  any  sins  we 
ever  committed  in  the  Fatherland,  we  felt  we  had  been 
richly  chastised.  I  understood  now  why  General 
Sherman  once  crossed  the  Atlantic  to  escape  March- 
ing through  Georgia — only  to  be  bombarded  with  it 
beneath  his  windows  before  breakfast  by  an  Irish  band 
in  Queenstown  before  he  had  been  in  Europe  twelve 
hours.  I  am  morally  certain  that  when  old  Tecumseh 
said  that  "War  is  hell,"  he  was  thinking  about  March- 
ing through   Georgia.     That  is  what  Deutschland, 


188  THE   ASSAULT 

Deutschland  iiber  Alles  made  me  think  about  Arma- 
geddon. 

None  of  us  experienced  any  special  difficulty  in  re- 
straining our  emotions  when  Lieutenant-Colonel  von 
Buttlar  and  our  other  German  chaperons  handed  us  over 
at  Bentheim  to  a  Dutch  train  crew  awaiting  our  arrival 
there  with  a  Dutch  locomotive.  The  colonel  clicked 
and  bowed  his  farewell  respects  to  Sir  Edward 
Goschen  and  Baron  Beyens,  accepted  their  apprecia- 
tions of  his  courtesy  and  helpfulness,  saluted- for  the 
last  time,  and  then  formally  transferred  us  to  Queen 
Wilhelmina's  tender  mercies.  The  hour  of  our  libera- 
tion was  at  hand.  And  for.  the  first  time  in  a  week  a 
score  of  Englishmen  and  at  least  one  American 
thought  out  aloud  their  opinions  about  Germany  and 
all  her  works.  What  some  of  us  said  about  the  Hohen- 
zollerns  has  been  put  by  Colonel  Watterson  in  far  more 
immortal  diction  than  my  poor  pen  could  epitomize  it. 

At  Rozendaal,  the  first  station  in  Holland,  there  was 
a  wild  scramble  from  the  newspaper  coach  for  the 
railway  telegraph-office.  All  of  us  had  reams  of 
"copy"  to  release,  after  having  been  muzzled  for  five 
days.  German  money,  we  were  distressed  to  observe, 
was  already  at  a  discount  in  the  Netherlands,  and  those 
of  us  who  did  not  hand  in  Dutch  or  British  gold  had 
to  put  our  "stuff"  on  the  wire  after  more  fortunate 
colleagues  had  beaten  us  to  it  with  legal  tender.  A 
couple  of  hours  later  found  us  at  Amsterdam,  where 
representatives  of  the  British  Legation  at  The  Hague 
and  the  local  Consulate-General  were  on  hand  to  greet 
Sir  Edward  Goschen's  party  and  furnish  us  with  the 
first  news  of  actual  war  operations  which  we  had  had. 
Fighting  at  sea  had  begun.    England  had  drawn  first 


Copyright,  Newspaper  Illustrators,  Limited. 
Sir  Edward   Goschen,    late   British    Ambassador   in    Berlin,  boarding 
S.  S.  St.  Petersburg,  en  route  to  London,  August  7th,  1914. 


SAFE    CONDUCT  189 

blood.  The  German  mine-layer  Konigin  Luise,  within 
eighteen  hours  of  the  declaration  of  hostilities,  i.  e.,  on 
Wednesday,  August  5,  was  overtaken  by  the  British 
destroyer  Lance  and  sunk  in  six  minutes.  There  was 
reason  to  fear  that  a  fleet  of  enemy  mine-layers, 
masquerading  as  fishing-boats  and  in  other  pacific  dis- 
guises, had  been  occupied  for  the  better  part  of  a  week 
strewing  mines  through  an  area  reaching  from  a  point 
off  Harwich — which  we  were  soon  to  approach — 
along  the  east  coast  far  up  into  Scottish  waters.  On 
the  next  day,  Thursday,  August  6,  the  British  light 
cruiser  Amphion  struck  a  mine  planted  by  the  Konigin 
Luise  and  went  down  with  heavy  loss  of  life. 
Much  more  cheering  was  the  news  that  gallant  Bel- 
gium was  giving  the  Germans  a  welcome  they  had  not 
bargained  for.  The  Meuse  was  being  gloriously 
defended.  Liege  was  menaced,  but  still  untaken.  Ger- 
mans had  been  mown  down  by  the  regiment — if  re- 
ports could  be  believed — and  we  devoured  them 
eagerly.  No  news  is  ever  so  welcome  as  that  which 
one  longs  to  hear — even  before  it  is  confirmed. 

The  Hook  was  ready  for  us,  we  were  told.  The 
Great  Eastern  steamer  St.  Petersburg  was  there 
awaiting  our  arrival,  having  the  night  before  landed 
Prince  Lichnowsky  and  the  other  members  of  the  Ger- 
man Embassy  in  London.  The  Kaiser's  emissary  had 
passed  to  the  ship  through  a  British  guard  of  honor, 
while  shore  batteries  fired  an  ambassador's  salute. 
How  like  Sir  Edward  Goschen's  slinking  departure 
from  Berlin,  we  thought!  Shortly  after  two  o'clock 
the  St.  Petersburg  lifted  anchor  and  amid  typical 
North  Sea  weather,  raw,  rainy  and  misty,  got  under 
way.     Few  thought  of  German  submarines  at  that 


190  THE   ASSAULT 

time,  but  the  Berlin  Government,  we  pondered,  had 
not  guaranteed  Sir  Edward  Goschen  "safe  conduct" 
through  an  indiscriminately  sown  field  of  floating 
mines.  Quite  obviously,  we  had  now  to  pass  through 
a  zone  bristling  with  uncertainty,  to  put  it  mildly.  But 
•^e  had  not  steamed  far  into  the  open  sea  before  the 
sight  of  a  British  torpedo-boat  flotilla  on  patrol  con- 
vinced us  that  we  were  in  a  well-shepherded  course. 
Then  we  had  our  first  ocular  demonstration  of  Jelli- 
coe's  unremitting  vigilance,  for  the  crescent  of  de- 
stroyers far  forward  now  began  rapidly  to  close  in 
upon  us.  Our  identity  was  apparently  not  known  to 
them,  and  they  were  taking  no  chances.  "They  sent  a 
shot  across  our  bow  yesterday,  with  the  Germans  on 
board,"  explained  the  skipper  of  the  St.  Petersburg  to 
Captain  Henderson,  the  Naval  Attache,  who  was  with 
him  on  the  bridge.  Captain  Henderson  was  not  dis- 
turbed by  the  possibility  of  our  getting  an  innocuous 
three-pounder  in  our  wireless  rigging  or  some  other 
harmless  token  of  the  destroyers'  solicitude,  but  he 
was  concerned  lest  so  innocent  a  craft  should  cause 
British  destroyer  captains  to  burn  up  valuable  oil  fuel 
needlessly  at  such  an  hour.  So  the  next  I  saw  of  Hen- 
derson he  was  wig-wagging  mysterious  messages  with 
signal-flags  from  the  bridge  of  the  St.  Petersburg, 
which  told  the  destroyers,  I  suppose,  that  we  weren't 
in  the  slightest  respect  worthy  of  their  attention  or 
shell.  They  wig-wagged  something  back  which  must 
have  pleased  Henderson,  for  presently  he  clambered 
down  smilingly  from  the  upper  regions,  and  said: 
"Thai's  all  right!" 

Harwich  hove  into  view  at  what  should  have  been 
sundown.    By  six  o'clock  we  were  at  the  pier,  boarded 


SAFE   CONDUCT  191 

by  the  naval  authorities  of  the  port  and  the  customs- 
men.  Sir  Edward  Goschen's  party,  after  the  Ambas- 
sador himself  had  vouched  for  the  identity  of  each 
and  every  one  of  us,  was  disembarked  without  formali- 
ties, and  at  six- forty-five  p.  m.  of  Friday,  August  7,  we 
found  ourselves  treading  British  soil.  There  were  po- 
licemen, soldiers,  reporters  and  photographers  on  the 
dock,  but  no  formal  welcoming  delegation  for  the 
Ambassador.  Somebody  whispered  to  him  that  a  spe- 
cial train  would  convey  him  and  his  refugees  to  Lon- 
don, and  to  it  he  took  his  way  as  undemonstratively  as 
if  he  were  a  Cook's  tourist  back  from  a  "tripper's" 
jaunt  to  the  Continent.  I  remarked  to  Tower  that  I  was 
afraid  Americans  would  have  made  a  real  fuss  over 
Goschen  if  he  were  our  Ambassador  home  from  the 
enemy's  country;  whereupon  The  Daily  News  man 
ejaculated  something  which  was  to  ring  in  my  ears  for 
a  year  or  more,  whenever  I  presumed,  to  comment  on 
that  strange  phenomenon  with  which  it  is  now  my  task 
to  deal — England  and  the  English  in. war-time :  "Wile, 
you  Americans  can  not  understand  the  English 
character."    Tower  was  right. 

An  American  is  general  manager  of  the  Great 
Eastern  Railway.  I  strongly  suspect  that  he  must 
have  had  an  alien  hand  in  even  the  semblance  of  a 
"demonstration"  of  greeting  which  Sir  Edward 
Goschen  encountered  when  our  train  pulled  into  Liv- 
erpool Street  Station  a  little  after  eleven  o'clock. 
I  did  not  wait  to  watch  it,  nor  even  to  claim  my  bag- 
gage, for  there  was  a  hungry  first  edition  waiting  for 
my  "story"  at  The  Daily  Mail  office,  and  to  Carmelite 
House  I  flew  in  the  first  taxi  into  which  I  could  leap. 
By  midnight  Beattie,  the  night  editor,  was  tearing 


192  THE   ASSAULT 

"copy"  from  my  hands  as  fast  as  an  Underwood  could 
reel  it  off,  and  it  was  rapidly  approaching  breakfast- 
time  when  I  called  it  a  night's  work  and  went  to  bed — 
in  England  at  last 


CHAPTER  XIII 

COMPLACENCY  RULES   THE   WAVES 

MORE  than  once  during  the  last  phase  of  our 
exciting  journey  to  England,  across  the  mine- 
strewn  waters  between  the  Hook  and  Harwich,  I  re- 
flected that  I  seemed  doomed  to  take  up  my  residence 
on  British  soil  in  war-time.  It  was  in  the  spring  of 
1900,  in  the  anxious  days  between  Ladysmith  and 
Mafeking,  when  the  tide  of  victory  was  still  running 
in  favor  of  the  Boers,  that  I  first  arrived  in  London, 
and  my  lot  was  cast  there  for  the  succeeding  year  and 
a  half  of  the  South  African  struggle.  I  felt  certain 
that  the  feverish  interest  with  which  even  the  sluggish 
British  temperament  had  followed  every  detail  of  a 
campaign  ten  thousand  miles  away,  and  which  en- 
grossed only  a  fraction  of  the  Empire's  strength, 
would  pale  into  tepid  insignificance  compared  to  the 
concern  which  would  be  generated  by  a  tremendous 
European  war  only  a  channel-crossing  distant.  But  I 
had  time  for  only  one  breakfast  and  one  morning's 
papers  before  I  realized  that  John  Bull  had  donned, 
even  for  Armageddon,  the  garment  in  which  his  bosom 
swells  the  proudest — the  armor  of  invincible  inex- 
citability. 

Actually  the  only  wrought-up  people  in  the  British 
Isles  during  the  first  week  of  the  war  appeared  to 
be  the  frantic  American  tourist  refugees,  who,  of 

193 


194  THE   ASSAULT, 

course,  heavily  outnumbered  their  brothers  and  sisters 
in  wretchedness  whom  I  had  left  behind  in  Germany. 
If  it  had  not  been  for  the  frantic  transatlantic  sob 
and  worry  fraternity  storming  the  steamship  and  ex- 
press companies'  offices  in  Cockspur  Street  and  the 
Haymarket  on  the  morning  of  Saturday,  August  8, 
when  I  went  out  to  look  for  the  war  in  London,  no  one 
could  possibly  have  made  me  believe  that  such  a  thing 
existed.  Such  portions  of  the  community  as  had  not 
started  for  the  links,  the  ocean,  the  river  or  the  coun- 
try "as  usual"  were  demeaning  themselves  as  self- 
respecting,  imperturbable  Britons  customarily  do  on 
the  edge  of  a  "week-end."  The  seaside  holiday  season 
was  at  its  zenith.  The  immortal  "Twelfth,"  when 
grouse-shooting  begins,  was  approaching.  Everybody 
who  was  anybody  was  "out  of  town,"  and  stayed 
there.  It  was  only  those  fussy,  fretting  Americans 
who  insisted  upon  losing  their  equilibrium  and  con- 
verting the  most  placid  metropolis  in  the  universe  into 
a  bedlam  of  unseemly  agitation  and  alarm.  It  was 
"extraordinary,"  Englishmen  said,  how  they  resolutely 
declined  to  take  a  lesson  from  the  composite  stolidity 
of  Britain,  preferring  to  give  their  emotions  unre- 
strained rein  and  to  keep  the  cables  hot  in  imperious 
demands  for  ships,  gold  and  other  panaceas  for  the 
scared  and  stranded.  Which  reminds  me  to  say  that 
traditional  British  hospitality  to  the  stranger  within 
the  gate  was  never  showered  more  graciously  on 
American  friends  than  in  that  trying  hour. 

The  British  had  worried  a  whole  week  about  the 
war  already.  That  was  a  departure  and  a  concession 
of  no  mean  magnitude,  for  it  is  their  boast  and  pride 
that  they  never  "worry."    Having,  however,  yielded 


COMPLACENCY   RULES   THE   WAVES     195 

to  such  un-British  instincts  in  the  earliest  hours  of  the 
crisis,  they  pulled  themselves  together  and  swore  a 
solemn  resolve,  come  what  may,  not  soon  again  to  suc- 
cumb to  indecorous  habits  which  the  world  associated 
exclusively  with  the  explosive  French  or  the  irrespon- 
sibly impulsive  "Yankees."  I  felt  instinctively  that  an 
effectual  rebuke  was  being  administered  to  me  person- 
ally by  the  writer  of  the  following  newspaper  review 
of  London  after  three  days  of  war: 

"A  new  metal  has  come  into  the  London  crowd  out 
of  the  crucible  of  these  last  few  days.  The  froth  and 
fume  of  flag-wagging  have  evaporated;  so,  too,  have 
lifted  bone-quaking  mists  of  dread  and  suspense.  Ex- 
ultation and  depression  are  alike  unhealthy.  It  is  good 
that  we  are  now  free  from  them. 

"The  faces  in  the  street  are  the  barometers  of  the 
souls  that  men  hide.  It  does  one's  heart  good  to  walk 
London  and  to  behold  that  very  notable  rise — apparent 
to  every  one  and  swift  in  its  example — of  the  mercury 
of  the  people.  The  great  war  took  all  our  comprehen- 
sions unawares.  Although  it  has  boded  for  years,  it 
walked  at  last  like  an  unbelievable  spectre  into  a  warm 
and  lighted  room.  What  wonder  that  we  were  shaken  ? 
What  wonder  at  a  creeping  ague  of  the  spirit  in  front 
of  the  unknown? 

"The  dizziness  has  gone.  The  trial  before  us,  black 
as  it  is,  is  not  so  black  as  our  anticipation  of  it.  We 
have  already  surprised  ourselves  no  less  than  we  have 
confounded  our  enemies  by  our  rally  and  our  readi- 
ness. The  financial  situation  is  saved,  the  banks  re- 
open, the  food  supplies  are  safeguarded,  and  prices 
controlled. 


196  [THE  ASSAULT] 

"A  tremendous  accession  of  calmness  and  reliance 
has  come  to  the  nation  by  the  appointment  of  Lord 
Kitchener  to  the  War  Office.  The  news  that  the  Army 
is  in  his  hands,  a  rock  of  a  man,  has  swept  through 
London  like  a  vivifying  breeze. 

"London  is  swinging  back  to  as  much  of  its  normal 
life  as  possible.  She  has  found  herself.  She  is  bravely 
being  the  usual  London — the  great  city  serene." 

Far  more  profitable,  obviously,  than  hunting  war 
excitement  was  examination  of  the  causes  which  ac- 
counted for  its  absence,  and  to  that  I  forthwith  de- 
voted myself.  In  the  first  place,  there  was  the  navy, 
"England's  All  in  All."  By  a  fortuitous  circumstance, 
for  which,  with  all  his  faults,  the  Empire  must  render 
imperishable  gratitude  to  its  young  half -American 
First  Lord  of  the  Admiralty,  Winston  Churchill,  the 
Fleet  was  instantly  at  its  "war  stations,"  fully  mo- 
bilized, and  in  a  state  of  battle-readiness  and  general 
efficiency  unparalleled  in  British  history.  War  ma- 
neuvers on  an  unapproached  scale  had  been  in  prog- 
ress for  the  preceding  fortnight  or  three  weeks.  Only 
the  merest  word  of  command  was  wanting  to  convert 
the  Grand  Fleet  into  the  battering-ram  and  shield,  to 
constitute  which  in  the  hour  of  emergency  it  had  been 
created.  "Ringed  by  her  leaden  seas,"  which  were 
held,  moreover,  by  a  "supreme"  armada,  there  seemed 
every  justification  for  equanimity,  for  the  United 
Kingdom  has  no  frontiers  which  an  invading  army  can 
violate  as  long  as  Britannia  rules  the  waves. 

The  domestic  political  situation,  more  menacingly 
turbulent  than  at  any  time  within  the  memory  of  living 
Englishmen,  had  been  resolved  with  miraculous  rapid- 


COMPLACENCY   RULES   THE   WAVES     197 

ity  and  completeness.  "Revolution"  in  Ulster,  on 
which  the  Germans  had  so  fondly  banked,  vanished  as 
effectually  as  if  it  had  never  raised  its  head.  "We  will 
ourselves  defend  the  coasts  of  Ireland,"  declared  John 
Redmond  in  the  House  of  Commons  in  a  speech  which 
will  never  die,  "and  I  say  to  the  Government  that  they 
may  to-morrow  withdraw  every  one  of  their  troops 
from  Ireland."  Mrs.  Pankhurst,  freshly  released  from 
a  periodical  hunger-striking  sojourn  in  Brixton  jail, 
announced  that  the  suffragettes  had  stacked  arms  and 
now  knew  only  womankind's  duty  to  England.  That 
sent  another  Berlin  dream  careening  into  oblivion. 
"His  Majesty's  Loyal  Opposition"  proclaimed  in  Par- 
liament through  the  mouth  of  the  Conservative  leader, 
Bonar  Law,  that  the  Government's  political  opponents 
were  prepared  to  accord  it  "unhesitating  support."  In 
the  Government  itself  the  "Potsdam  Party,"  as  that 
relentless  iconoclast,  Leo  Maxse,  long  termed  the  co- 
terie which  was  for  peace  with  Germany  at  almost  any 
price,  was  either  weeded  out  or  suppressed.  Lord 
Morley,  the  Lord  President  of  the  Council;  "Honest 
John"  Burns,  still  true  to  convictions,  President  of  the 
Local  Government  Board,  and  Charles  P.  Trevelyan, 
Parliamentary  Secretary  of  the  Board  of  Education, 
unobtrusively  retired  from  Mr.  Asquith's  official  fam- 
ily in  consequence  of  their  inability  to  sanction  the 
war.  They  have  played  their  parts  meantime  with 
honorable  consistency — by  maintaining  an  hermetical 
silence  on  questions  of  the  war.  And  finally,  though 
primarily  in  popular  judgment,  Lord  Haldane,  the 
graduate  of  Gottingen,  the  translator  of  Schopenhauer 
and  the  admirer  of  German  Geist,  was  driven  by  scan- 
dalized public  opinion  from  the  War  Office,  whither 


198  THE   ASSAULT 

he  had  just  come  as  an  "assistant"  to  the  Prime  Minis- 
ter, whose  cabinet  portfolio  was  the  Secretaryship  for 
War.  Most  of  England  sighed  with  thankful  relief 
when  the  able  Scotch  lawyer  and  philosopher  whom 
contemporary  history  accuses  of  responsibility  for 
Britain's  military  unpreparedness,  beat  an  ignominious 
retreat  back  to  his  regular  post,  the  wool-sack, 
which,  as  Lord  Chancellor,  he  by  general  consent 
conspicuously  adorned.  The  country's  relief  became 
enthusiastic  assurance  when  the  lawyer,  Asquith,  him- 
self retired  from  the  War  Office,  to  make  way  for  the 
soldier,  Kitchener,  who  was  recalled  by  telegram  the 
day  before  from  Dover,  just  as  he  was  about  to  board 
ship  for  Cairo,  to  resume  his  duties  as  the  ruler  of 
Egypt.  With  the  "Potsdam  Party"  banished  or  made 
harmless,  the  Cabinet  was  now  regarded  as  satis- 
factorily purged.  The  public  heard  with  boundless 
gratification  that  the  "strong  men"  of  the  Government 
— Grey,  Lloyd-George  and  Churchill — had  been  un- 
compromisingly for  war  from  the  start  as  the  only 
recourse  compatible  with  British  honor,  to  say  nothing 
,  of  the  elementary  dictates  of  self-preservation.  It  was 
at  length  possible  for  Mr.  Asquith  to  assure  the  coun- 
try that  he  presided  over  an  administration  of  whose 
unity  of  view  and  determination  there  was  no  shadow 
of  a  doubt — a  Government  which  was  resolved,  as  Sir 
Edward  Grey's  great  speech  in  the  House  of  Commons 
on  August  3  set  forth,  to  accomplish  three  cardinal 
purposes : 

1.  To  protect  the  defenseless  French  coast  against 
attack  by  the  German  navy ; 

2.  To  defend  the  integrity  of  Belgium ;  and 


COMPLACENCY    RULES    THE   WAVES      199 

3.  To  put  forth  all  Britain's  strength  and  not  run 
away  from  the  obligations  of  honor  and  interest. 

When  the  events  of  the  Great  War,  and  perhaps  the 
chief  actors  in  it  themselves,  have  passed  away,  some 
British  historian  will  almost  certainly  arise  to  tell  the 
world  the  story — the  "inside  story" — of  how  Mr. 
Asquith's  cabinet,  through  three  days  and  nights  of 
doubts,  uncertainties,  trials  and  tribulations,  crossed 
the  Rubicon  to  the  shore  of  unanimity  on  the  subject 
of  British  participation.  There  were  moments,  beyond 
all  question,  when  that  issue  hung  perilously  in  the 
balance.  The  French  Government's  frantic  eleventh- 
hour  appeals  for  a  decision  in  Downing  Street  are 
mute  evidence  of  the  vacillation  which  prevailed — a 
species  of  tentativeness  which  has  never  been  missing 
from  the  British  conduct  of  the  purely  diplomatic  af- 
fairs of  the  war.  The  ministerial  debates  during  which 
the  die  was  cast  in  favor  of  war  will  make  immortal 
reading,  even  if  only  a  digest  of  them  is  all  that  is 
vouchsafed  posterity.  The  "strong  men"  of  the  Gov- 
ernment, if  report  is  reliable,  were  called  upon  to  fight 
valiantly  and  ceaselessly  to  avoid  England's  "running 
away  from  the  obligations  of  honor  and  interest."  The 
tense  interval  which  ensued  while  they  were  battering 
down  the  trenches  of  skepticism,  chicken-heartedness 
and  nonchalance  among  their  Cabinet  colleagues  caused 
a  delay  which  might  easily  have  proved  of  fatal  import; 
for  the  decision  to  throw  the  strength  of  the  British 
army,  as  well  as  the  navy,  into  the  scales  was  under 
discussion,  and  it  is  conceivable  that  the  Expeditionary 
Force,  which  it  was  eventually  determined  to  send, 
might  have  been  kept  back  for  weeks,  or  even  alto- 


200  JHE   ASSAULT, 

gether,  instead  of  the  mere  days  its  dispatch  was  actu- 
ally retarded.  Disaster  incalculable  would  almost  in- 
evitably have  resulted  in  that  event. 

The  indispensable  and  all-governing  preliminary 
measures  for  war  in  respect  of  domestic  politics,  the 
Government  and  the  naval  and  military  administration 
having  thus  been  taken,  equally  radical  precautions 
were  invoked  to  put  the  nation's  economic  house  in 
order.  The  Stock  Exchange,  following  the  lead  of 
New  York,  Paris  and  Berlin,  had  shut  down  as  early 
as  July  31,  in  order  that  mere  insensate  panic  on  the 
part  of  the  speculative  and  investing  world  might  not 
degenerate  into  irretrievable  rout.  War  having  de- 
scended with  irresistible  suddenness  during  the  "week- 
end" preceding  the  traditional  August  Bank  Holiday 
(Monday,  the  3rd),  a  meeting  of  great  financiers  in 
the  Bank  of  England  on  the  holiday  itself  decided  to 
prolong  it,  as  far  as  banks  and  bankers  were  concerned, 
for  three  days,  i.  e.,  until  Friday,  the  7th,  in  what 
turned  out  to  be  the  well-grounded  hope  that  public 
excitement  would  meantime  subside  and  prevent 
"runs"  ruinous  alike  to  banks  and  depositors.  A 
moratorium  was  established.  The  Bank  discount-rate, 
which  had  already  vaulted  from  four  to  eight  percent., 
was  now  raised  to  ten,  an  unheard-of  figure,  which  ef- 
fectually curbed  the  lust  of  persons  anxious  to  profit 
from  war  abnormalities  or  otherwise  indulge  in  opera- 
tions not  consistent  with  the  gravity  of  the  hour. 

It  was  mainly  these  things — wholesome,  substantial 
proofs  that  their  rulers  had  grappled  with  the  situation 
with  bold  initiative  that  inspired  the  people  of  Lon- 
don with  reassurance,  which,  diluted  with  the  stoicism 
of   the   British   character,    became    calm   confidence 


COMPLACENCY    RULES    THE   WAVES     201 

Gibraltar-like  in  its  inflexibility.  She  had  "the  men," 
England  was  saying;  she  had  "the  ships,"  and,  Parlia- 
ment having  voted  an  initial  war  fund  of  one  hundred 
million  pounds  as  unconcernedly  as  if  it  were  a  thou- 
sand-pounds grant  for  a  new  switch-track  at  Woolwich 
arsenal,  she  unmistakably  had  "the  money,"  too. 

But  even  more  self -comforting,  if  possible,  than  this 
iron  trust  in  her  own  inexhaustible  resources  was  Eng- 
land's conviction  in  the  invincibility  of  her  Allies. 
Was  not  even  little  Belgium  holding  back  the  flower 
of  the  German  army  before  Liege?  Even  in  the  un- 
likely event  of  Liege's  fall,  would  not  the  impregnable 
fortress  of  Namur  provide  Krupp  guns  with  a  still 
tougher  nut  to  crack  ?  Those  were,  alas !  the  hours  in 
which  the  existence  of  the  forty-two-centimeter  siege 
gun  was  not  even  mooted  in  ostrich  England.  France  ? 
The  Germans  would  find  a  vastly  different  antagonist 
awaiting  them  this  time  in  the  Ardennes,  the  Vosges 
passes  and  along  the  Meuse  and  the  Sambre.  There 
was  a  "New  France,"  a  France  of  elan  and  iron.  It 
was  the  virile  Republic  of  Poincare,  Delcasse,  Joffre, 
Bleriot,  Pegoud  and  Carpentier,  with  which  the  Prus- 
sian hosts  must  this  time  measure  lances,  not  the 
degenerate  Empire  of  the  third  Napoleon,  which  crum- 
bled at  Sedan  and  Metz  and  surrendered  Paris.  Rus- 
sia? "Can't  you  just  hear  the  steam-roller  rumbling 
across  East  Prussia  and  thundering  at  the  gates  of 
Berlin  ?"  a  great  English  peer  asked  me,  in  all  serious- 
ness, during  my  first  week  in  London.  "Isn't  the  tread 
of  the  Czar's  countless  millions,  pounding  remorse- 
lessly toward  the  west,  almost  audible?"  he  persisted. 
Millions  of  Englishmen  were  thinking  and  saying 
the  same  thing.     As  for  the  German  army,  almost 


202  THE   ASSAULT 

as  many  of  them  were  convinced  that  that  "over- 
organized,  peace-stale"  military  establishment,  which 
was  a  magnificent  spectacle  on  parade,  but  lacked  lead- 
ers experienced  in  modern  campaigning,  would  crash 
to  pieces  not  only  against  "superior  numbers"  but 
against  Allied  troops  and  commanders  who  had  been 
fighting  great  wars  this  past  quarter  of  a  century 
in  Africa  and  Asia.  London's  feelings  toward  Ger- 
many seemed,  indeed,  almost  compassionate.  Many 
people,  otherwise  sane,  talked  about  the  war  being  over 
by  Christmas.  The  Kaiser's  navy  would  come  out 
and  be  smashed,  they  calculated,  and  such  work  as  had 
not  already  been  accomplished  by  the  Allied  armies 
within  the  Fatherland's  eastern  and  western  frontiers 
would  soon  be  completed  by  "internal  collapse,"  indus- 
trial stagnation,  national  impoverishment  and  univer- 
sal starvation.  Poor  Germany!  She  had  brought  it 
on  herself.  Her  end,  after  a  peace  soon  to  be  dictated 
in  Berlin,  would  manifestly  be  speedy  and  annihilating. 
The  Social  Democrats,  it  was  true,  were  bambooz- 
led into  support  of  the  war  by  fictitious  assurances 
that  the  sword  had  been  "forced"  into  Germany's  un- 
willing and  blameless  hand,  but  the  scales  would 
presently  fall  from  their  eyes,  and  then  woe  betide 
whatever  remained  of  the  Hohenzollerns*  ravished,  de- 
fenseless realm!  Street-hawkers  in  the  Strand  were 
selling  blatant  copies — a  penny  each — of  The  Kaiser's 
Last  Will  and  Testament.  Would  William  II  be  sent 
to  St.  Helena,  like  the  other  Napoleon,  or  be  interned 
in  some  more  accessible  point  in  the  British  Empire,  to 
pass  the  remaining  days  of  his  humiliation  and  re- 
morse? And  the  "Crown  Prince"  with  him,  of  course. 
These  were  the  reveries  of  Britain  in  the  early  days  of 


COMPLACENCY   RULES   THE   WAVES     203 

August,  1914.  Nothing  disturbed  them  except  the 
creaking  and  the  rumbling  of  the  Russian  steam-roller. 
Those  being  dulcet  reverberations,  John  Bull  paused 
eagerly  in  the  midst  of  his  musings  to  let  them  lull  him 
into  a  still  deeper  siesta  of  optimism.     .     .     . 

Serene  and  imperturbable  as  the  vast  majority  of 
Englishmen  were,  the  responsible  leaders  of  the  nation 
were  under  no  delusions  as  to  the  magnitude  of  the 
task  now  confronting  them.  To  the  country's  intense 
astonishment,  though  Lord  Roberts  had  been  dinning 
it  in  their  ears  incessantly  for  at  least  five  years  pre- 
vious, England  found  itself  in  a  state  of  practical  im- 
potence as  far  as  effective  participation  in  modern 
large-scale  military  operations  was  concerned.  In  the 
same  five  minutes  during  which  Parliament  voted  one 
hundred  million  pounds  as  a  first  war  credit,  it  also 
sanctioned  an  increase  of  the  British  army  by  five 
hundred  thousand  men.  At  that  moment  the  Home 
military  establishment,  which  was  immediately  mo- 
bilized as  "The  British  Army  Expeditionary  Force" 
when  England  decided  to  enter  the  war  with  her  sol- 
diers as  well  as  her  sailors,  consisted  of  eight  divisions 
of  all  arms — roundly,  one  hundred  fifty  thousand  men. 
An  organization  of  another  half-million  troops,  offi- 
cered and  equipped  for  a  great  Continental  campaign, 
could  not  be  stamped  out  of  the  ground.  Its  produc- 
tion, even  in  a  country  with  the  glorious  military  tra- 
ditions of  England,  was  manifestly  fraught  with  stu- 
pendous difficulties.  There  was  no  mistrust  of  British 
patriotism ;  but  when  men  recalled  the  futility  of  Lord 
Roberts'  efforts  to  implant  in  England's  conscience  the 
necessity  of  some  form  of  National  Service — how  he 
not  only  failed*  but  was  ridiculed  and  vilified  for  pur- 


204  [THE   ASSAULT 

suing  his  sagacious  crusade  in  the  face  of  merciless 
rebuff — and  when  inherent  British  repugnance  to  "sol- 
diering" and  even  to  wearing  uniforms  was  remem- 
bered, there  were  widespread  misgivings. 

Prussian  militarism  long  filled  me  with  abhorrence. 
I  had  learned  to  detest  it  not  as  an  institution,  but  for 
its  numerous  disgusting  manifestations,  principally 
the  arrogance  of  its  gilded  popinjays  and  the  brutal 
and  overweening  contempt  in  which  their  traditions 
and  training  taught  them  to  hold  mere  civilian  mi- 
crobes. Yet  in  those  frantic  hours  when  hopelessly 
unready  military  England  was  compelled  to  patch  up 
an  army  for  battle  against  the  world's  most  scien- 
tific war-machine,  I  pondered  what  a  blessing  a  little 
"militarism"  would  have  been  for  the  British  democ- 
racy. I  had  seen  Germany  trooping  off  to  war,  singing, 
cheering  and  flower-garnished;  and  I  knew  that  her 
debonair  demeanor  was  due  less  to  lust  for  the  fray — 
the  great  mass  of  the  nation  was  animated  by  no  such 
sentiment  as  that — than  to  the  realization,  which 
sprang  from  immutable  facts  and  numbers,  that  her 
citizen  army  was  equal  to  almost  any  emergencies  it 
would  be  called  upon  to  meet.  Germany  was  a  nation 
in  arms.  England  was  a  nation  in  difficulties.  How 
grotesquely  unprepared  to  play  a  commensurate  part 
in  a  military  war,  compared  to  her  Continental  allies 
and  foes,  this  table  showing  the  size  of  the  various 
armies  indicates : 

Peace  footing  War  footing  Guns 

Great  Britain  234,000             380,000  1,000 

Austria-Hungary 500,000           2,200,000  2,500 

France   (including  Algeria)..      790,000           4,000,000  4,200 

Germany    850,000           6,000,000  5,500 

Russia  1,700,000          7,000,000  6,000 


COMPLACENCY    RULES    THE   WAVES     205 

Lord  Kitchener  was  obviously  the  man  of  the  hour. 
An  organizer  primarily,  rather  than  a  strategist,  tacti- 
cian or  field-marshal,  his  appointment  to  the  War  Sec- 
retaryship demonstrated  that  whoever  was  responsible 
for  it — men  say  it  was  Lord  Northcliffe — recognized 
instantly  the  all-overshadowing  requirement :  a  re- 
cruiting sergeant.  Joffre,  the  French  Commander-in- 
Chief,  would  necessarily  retain  the  supreme  direction 
of  the  Allied  forces  operating  against  the  German 
front  in  France  and  Belgium.  England's  part  was  to 
send  him  men.  And  the  one  to  find,  drill  and  equip 
them  was  unmistakably  Kitchener  of  Khartum,  South 
Africa,  India  and  Egypt,  the  "organizer"  of  victory 
against  the  fuzzy-wuzzies  and  the  Boers,  the  discipli- 
narian who  had  galvanized  the  Indian  army  into  new 
life,  and  the  administrator  who  was  licking  Egypt  into 
Imperial  shape.  There  would  be  time  enough  for  the 
war  itself  to  produce  another  Wellington  or  Roberts. 
What  was  needed  now  wras  men,  rifles  and  guns,  cart- 
ridges, shells  and  uniforms,  war-planes,  motor-lorries 
and  hospital-trains  and  all  the  other  innumerable  im- 
pedimenta of  modern  man-killing.  The  summoning  to 
the  task  of  the  big  bluff  soldier  who  first  saw  the  light 
in  County  Kerry,  who  was  looked  upon  as  the  incarna- 
tion of  initiative  and  relentless  efficiency,  and  who  had 
proved  his  right  so  to  be  considered,  was  elementary 
and  inevitable.  It  was  work  for  a  "sergeant-major" 
and  a  "drill-sergeant"  rather  than  for  a  Napoleonic 
genius ;  and  when  England  learned  that  "K.,"  as  he  is 
affectionately  known  in  the  army,  was  on  the  prodig- 
ious job,  England  took  heart.  She  responded  with  a 
will  to  his  first  appeal  for  men.    The  hoardings  of  the 


206  THE   ASSAULT 

Kingdom  were  plastered  with  it  on  the  morning  of  Au- 
gust 8.    It  read  as  follows : 


YOUR  KING  AND  COUNTRY 
NEED  YOU. 

A  CALL  TO  ARMS 

An  addition  of  100,000  men  to  his  Majesty's  Regular  Army 

is   immediately   necessary  in   the  present  grave   National 

Emergency. 

Lord  Kitchner  is  confident  that  this  appeal  will  be  at  once 

responded  to  by  all  those  who  have  the  safety  of  our 

Empire  at  heart. 

TERMS  OF  SERVICE 

General  Service  for  a  period  of  3  years  or  until  the  war  is 

concluded. 

Age  of  Enlistment  between  19  and  30. 

HOW  TO  JOIN 

Full  information  can  be  obtained  at  any  Post  Office  in  the 
Kingdom  or  at  any  Military  depot 

GOD  SAVE  THE  KING1 


In  the  past  England's  volunteer  army  had  been 
maintained  by  a  recruiting  system  which  produced,  on 
the  average,  about  thirty-five  thousand  new  men  a 
year.  They  did  not  come  easily,  even  in  halcyon  peace 
times,  and  the  gaily-caparisoned  recruiting-sergeant  in 
Trafalgar  Square,  who  would  buttonhole  a  hundred 
likely  "Tommies"  in  a  day,  earned  well  his  fee  if  he  suc- 
ceeded in  inducing  ten  of  them  to  "take  the  shilling." 
It  remained  to  be  seen  if  "the  present  grave  National 


COMPLACENCY   RULES   THE   WAVES     207 

Emergency"  would  find  dormant  in  Britain  military 
talent  and  inclination  hitherto  undreamt  of.  In  the 
opening  flush  of  the  excitement  and  enthusiasm  which 
the  war  engendered,  Lord  Kitchener's  hopes  were  sat- 
isfactorily realized.  Recruiting-offices  in  numerous 
districts  were  literally  stormed.  The  response  from 
the  middle,  "upper-middle"  and  upper  classes  was  par- 
ticularly buoyant.  Duke,  peer,  aristocrat,  nobleman, 
"nut,"  banker,  lawyer,  doctor,  merchant,  teacher  and 
clerk  came  forward  splendidly.  But  artisan,  docker  and 
miner  lagged.  The  lower  class  revealed  an  inclination 
to  continue  to  throng  the  public-houses  rather  than  the 
recruiting-offices.  It  seemed  evident  at  the  outset  that 
it  was  not  they  who  were  bent  on  saving  England. 
They  gave  disquieting  indication  that  their  sort  of  pa- 
triotism was  primarily  individual  self-preservation,  that 
for  them,  love  of  country  began  at  home.  A  waking-up 
process  in  their  unenlightened  ranks  was  destined  to 
come  to  pass,  thanks  mainly  to  "separation  allowances" 
for  missus  and  the  kids,  but  it  was  never  to  attain  the 
dimensions  of  a  rousing  which  extorted  from  their 
atrophied  intelligence  even  an  approximate  apprecia- 
tion of  their  obligations  or  their  country's  peril. 
Britain's  war  is  being  waged,  as  it  will  be  won — speak- 
ing broadly — by  the  patriotism  and  blood  of  the  exco- 
riated upper  ten  thousand.  The  struggle  had  been  in 
progress  for  more  than  a  year,  at  a  cost  of  nearly 
five  hundred  thousand  British  casualties,  when  it 
was  still  necessary  for  Lloyd-George  to  remind  work- 
ing-class England,  in  as  unqualified  language  as  a  poli- 
tician dare  speak  to  the  nation's  electoral  masters,  that 
it  was  not  doing  its  full  duty. 

While  Britain  at  large  still  hugged  the  delusion  of 


208  THE   ASSAULT, 

easy  victory,  in  grotesque  underestimation  of  the  en- 
emy's power,  and  while  Kitchener's  recruit-finding 
machinery  was  being  put  in  vigorous  motion,  the  War 
Office,  in  co-operation  with  the  navy,  was  accomplish- 
ing as  magnificent  a  piece  of  military  work  as  army 
annals  hold — the  silent  landing  of  the  British  Expedi- 
tionary Force  of  one  hundred  and  sixty  thousand  men, 
with  its  full  complement  of  horses,  guns  and  stores,  on 
the  shores  of  France.  That  feat  will  live  as  immor- 
tal disproof  of  the  charge  popular  in  the  United 
States  that  "hustle"  is  a  word  which  is  conspicuously 
missing  from  the  British  lexicon.  Compared  to 
it,  our  "hustle"  in  landing  an  army  in  Cuba  in  1898 
was  the  quintessence  of  procrastination  and  muddle. 
The  British  railways  had  been  taken  over  by  the  Gov- 
ernment coincident  with  the  arrival  of  war,  an  "Exec- 
utive Committee"  consisting  of  the  General  Managers 
of  the  main  companies  having  been  established  more 
than  a  year  previous  as  an  advisory  council  for  such  an 
emergency  as  had  now  supervened.  Embarkation  of 
the  Expeditionary  Force  commenced  on  the  night  of 
August  7th.  Admiral  Jellicoe,  Commander-in-Chief  of 
the  Grand  Fleet,  assured  Lord  Kitchener  that  the  chan- 
nel passage  was  as  safe  as  the  Thames  itself.  The 
British  public,  receiving  its  first  lesson  in  relentless 
censorship  of  war  news,  was  kept  so  effectually  in  the 
dark  as  to  the  dispatch  of  the  largest  army  which  ever 
left  English  shores  that  it  knew  nothing  whatever  of 
it  till  the  host  was  at  its  destination,  with  breasts  bared 
to  the  foe.  The  landing  of  Sir  John  French's  legions 
on  the  soil  of  France  was  accomplished,  complete  in 
every  detail,  by  August  17th. 
British  railways,  when  the  record  of  that  marvel  of 


COMPLACENCY   RULES   THE   WAVES     209 

transportation  is  compiled,  will  share  the  honors  with 
the  ironclads  of  Britain's  navy  and  the  liners  of  her 
mercantile  marine.  Southampton  being  the  main  port 
of  departure,  the  performance  of  the  London  and 
Southwestern  Railway,  which  has  carried  so  many 
thousand  Americans  in  pacific  days  from  Waterloo 
Station  to  the  ship's  side,  is  a  case  in  point.  I  heard 
Sir  H.  A.  Walker,  the  "Southwestern' s"  general  man- 
ager make  before  the  American  Luncheon  Club  in 
London  the  first  announcement  of  the  railways'  part 
in  England's  military  mobilization.  With  his  subse- 
quent permission,  I  was  privileged  to  give  the  British 
public  its  first  information  on  that  subject.  The  L.  & 
S.  W.  had  been  assigned  the  task  of  making  ready  for 
dispatch  to  Southampton  within  sixty  hours  three 
hundred  and  fifty  trains  of  thirty  cars  each.  It  did  the 
trick  in  forty-five  hours.  During  the  first  three  weeks 
of  war  there  were  dispatched  to  and  unloaded  at  the 
ships'  sides  seventy-three  of  such  trains  every  fourteen 
hours.  They  arrived  from  the  four  quarters  of  the 
kingdom,  and  none  of  them  was  late.  "I  come  from 
the  land  of  'big  railway  stunts/ "  said  Henry  W. 
Thornton,  the  American  general  manager  of  the  Great 
Eastern  railway  when  Sir  H.  A.  Walker  had  told  this 
convincing  story  of  British  "hustle."  "We  think  we 
are  'pulling  off'  some  feat  when  we  handle  G.  A.  R. 
encampments  and  national  conventions,  but  what  Brit- 
ish railways  accomplished  in  the  ten  days  between 
August  7  and  17  last  may  fairly  be  claimed  as  a 
unique  record  in  railway  history."  What  Mr.  Thorn- 
ton modestly  failed  to  add  was  that  he  himself,  as  a 
colleague  presently  bore  testimony,  had  played  a  con- 
spicuous role  in  the  drama  of  British  military  mobiliza- 


210  [THE   ASSAULTj 

tion.  Certain  inanimate  things,  almost  as  well  known 
to  Americans  as  Mr.  Thornton,  played  big  parts,  too. 
The  palatial  Mauretania,  with  her  suites  de-luxe  bat- 
tered into  cargo-room  for  Tommy  Atkins,  and  her  big 
new  sister,  Aquitania,  with  only  a  maiden  crossing  or 
two  to  her  credit,  similarly  knocked  to  pieces,  made  in- 
cessant trips  back  and  forth  between  Southampton  and 
other  channel  ports  to  Dieppe,  Boulogne,  Calais  and 
Dunkirk,  landing  in  France  on  each  occasion  no  less 
than  five  thousand  British  fighting-men,  ready  for 
death  and  glory. 

Each  mother's  son  of  them  carried  with  him  this 
little  personal  message  from  Lord  Kitchener : 

"You  are  ordered  abroad  as  a  soldier  of  the  King  to 
help  our  French  comrades  against  the  invasion  of  a 
common  enemy.  You  have  to  perform  a  task  which 
will  need  your  courage,  your  energy,  your  patience. 

"Remember  that  the  honour  of  the  British  army  de- 
pends on  your  individual  conduct.  It  will  be  your 
duty,  not  only  to  set  an  example  of  discipline  and  per- 
fect steadiness  under  fire,  but  also  to  maintain  the  most 
friendly  relations  with  those  whom  you  are  helping  in 
this  struggle.  The  operations  in  which  you  are  en- 
gaged will,  for  the  most  part,  take  place  in  a  friendly 
country,  and  you  can  do  your  own  country  no  better 
service  than  in  showing  yourself  in  France  and  Bel- 
gium in  the  true  character  of  a  British  soldier. 

"Be  invariably  courteous,  considerate,  and  kind. 
Never  do  anything  likely  to  injure  or  destroy  property, 
and  always  look  upon  looting  as  a  disgraceful  act.  You 
are  sure  to  meet  with  a  welcome,  and  to  be  trusted; 
your  conduct  must  justify  that  welcome  and  that  trust. 


COMPLACENCY    RULES   THE   WAVES     211 

Your  duty  can  not  be  done  unless  your  health  is  sound. 
So  keep  constantly  on  your  guard  against  any  excesses. 
In  this  new  experience  you  may  find  temptations  in 
wine  and  women.  You  must  entirely  resist  both  temp- 
tations, and,  while  treating  all  women  with  perfect 
courtesy,  you  should  avoid  any  intimacy. 

"Do  your  duty  bravely. 

"Fear  God. 

"Honour  the  King. 

"Kitchener,  Field-Marshal." 

I  remained  in  England  only  a  week  after  my  arrival 
from  Germany.  Part  of  the  time  had  been  pleas- 
antly spent  editing  a  special  "American  edition"  of 
The  Times  for  Lord  Northcliffe,  who  placed  the 
full  machinery  of  his  journalistic  organization  at  the 
disposal  of  the  "Yankee  War  Refugees."  He  was 
only  prevented  from  extending  them  the  hospitality  of 
Sutton  Place,  his  lovely  estate  in  Surrey,  now  a  hos- 
pital, for  a  "week-end"  outing  by  the  inability  of  the 
railways  to  guarantee  the  necessary  special  train  facili- 
ties. To  my  astonishment  but  unalloyed  delight  Lord 
Northcliffe  "ordered"  me  to  take  a  month's  vacation  in 
the  United  States.  He  thought  my  family  and  kins- 
men would  like  to  have  a  look  at  an  "English  spy," 
fresh  from  Germany,  before  the  earmarks  of  his  nefa- 
rious trade  had  entirely  evaporated,  and  so,  having 
obtained  the  last  bunk  left  on  that  veteran  Cunard 
hulk,  S.  S.  Campania,  which  had  brought  my  wife  and 
me  to  Europe  on  our  honeymoon  voyage,  I  sailed 
away  from  Liverpool  on  Saturday,  August  15th, 
along  with  twelve  hundred  or  fifteen  hundred  other 
sardines  packed  in  an  eighteen-knot  steel  box. 


CHAPTER   XIV 

PRO-ALLY  UNCLE  SAM 

SOMEWHERE  in  E.  W.  Hornung's  Raffles, 
there  is  this  homely  bit  of  epigrammatic  phi- 
losophy : 

"Money  lost,  little  lost.  Honor  lost,  much  lost. 
Pluck  lost,  all  lost !" 

The  aphorism  was  paraphased  by  my  fellow  war 
refugees  in  the  Campania,  tucked  away  in  couples, 
trios,  quintettes  and  baker's  dozens  into  cabins  which 
the  Cunarder's  designers  back  in  the  dim  mid-Victo- 
rian past  built  for  a  half  or  a  third  as  many  passengers. 

They  made  it  read  like  this : 

"Baggage  lost,  all  lost !" 

Now  and  then  some  particularly  sentimental  soul 
would  spare  a  humanitarian  thought  for  the  minor 
horrors  of  the  calamity  which  had  fallen  upon  Europe 
and  civilization.  But  his  heart  would  not  throb  for 
long  when  somebody  would  break  in  upon  his  maudlin 
reflections  with  a  really  harrowing  tale  of  trunks  left 
behind  in  Berlin,  Hamburg  or  Cologne,  in  Carlsbad, 
Lucerne  or  Ostend,  at  the  Gare  du  Nord  in  Paris,  or 
the  quayside  in  Boulogne  or  Calais;  or  of  suit-cases 
and  "innovations"  lost,  strayed  or  stolen  in  the  mael- 
strom of  military  traffic  in  Germany,  Belgium  or 
France;  or  of  Packards,  Peerlesses,  Studebakers  or 
Overlands  summarily  abandoned  somewhere  in  the 

212 


PRO-ALLY   UNCLE    SAM  213 

war  zone.  What  were  Europe's  travails  to  these  gen- 
uine disasters  ?  It  was  all  right  for  the  war-mad  Con- 
tinent to  deck  itself  in  battle-paint  if  sanguinarily  in- 
clined, but  ruthlessly  and  without  notice  to  break  up 
Americans'  traveling  plans,  knock  Cook  tours  into  a 
cocked  hat,  interrupt  "cures,"  and  on  top  of  that,  if 
you  please,  actually  to  play  ducks  and  drakes  with  the 
personal  effects  of  free-born  American  citizens — all 
because,  forsooth,  eight  or  ten  million  troops  required 
the  right  of  way  and  insisted  upon  getting  it — that  was 
manifestly  the  last  word  in  inconsiderateness.  Inci- 
dentally, of  course,  it  denoted  how  hopelessly  ineffi- 
cient Europe  was,  anyway,  in  the  presence  of  a  sudden 
emergency.  Why,  the  general  manager  of  a  cross- 
town  transfer  company  in  New  York  would  have 
tackled  the  job  without  turning  a  hair.  Bah !  It 
served  Americans  right — quoth  a  promenade-deck 
psychologist.  Year  in  and  year  out  they'd  been  lavish- 
ing "good  United  States  dollars"  on  Europe,  and  this 
was  her  gratitude  to  her  best  paying  guests.  There 
was  no  dissent  from  the  view,  which  prevailed  from 
rudder  to  bow,  that  it  was  the  ragged  edge  of  what 
Bostonians  call  "the  limit."  "See  America  first!" 
ceasing  to  be  mere  admonition,  was  burnt  there  and 
then  into  the  hearts  of  our  baggage-bereft  ship's  com- 
pany with  all  the  force  of  a  fervid  national  aspiration. 
"Never  again !"  was  the  way  my  Chicago  millionairess 
deck-chair  neighbor,  who  looted  the  Rue  de  la  Paix 
annually,  sententiously  epitomized  not  only  her  ag- 
grieved sentiments,  but  those  of  nearly  everybody  else. 
All  swore  a  virtuous  vow  henceforth  to  practise  the 
stay-at-home  habit  and  for  the  rest  of  eternity  let  man- 
killing  Europe  wallow  in  its  savagery. 


214  THE   ASSAULT 

The  story  of  the  exodus  which  the  Second  Book  of 
Moses  records  will  probably  outlive  the  flight  of  the 
children  of  Columbia  across  the  Atlantic  in  the  sum- 
mer of  1914.  But  that  hegira  will  outrank  its  Egyptian 
prototype  in  one  gleaming  respect — its  atmosphere  of 
indomitable  good  humor,  once  the  Campanians  sur- 
mounted the  initial  stage  of  "grouch,"-  groaning  and 
gnashing  of  teeth. 

Bank  presidents  and  college  professors  willing  to  be 
buffeted  across  the  ocean  in  the  steerage;  society 
women  who  bunked  contentedly  on  sofas  in  the  "ladies' 
saloon"  of  the  stuffy  second  cabin;  Pittsburgh  pluto- 
crats game  enough  to  sleep  six  in  a  stateroom  built 
for  four;  pampered  folk  with  French  chefs  at  home, 
who  sat  uncomplainingly  through  the  interminable  and 
usually  refrigerated  "second  serving"  in  the  Cam- 
pania's old-fashioned  dining-room;  corporation  law- 
yers with  incomes  the  size  of  a  King's  civil  list,  who 
considered  themselves  lucky  to  have  captured  the  ham- 
mocks of  the  fourth  engineer  or  the  hospital  attendant 
in  the  odoriferous  hold;  all  these  compatriots,  grin- 
ning and  bearing,  proved  that  after  all  we  are  the  most 
adaptable  people  on  earth.  After  each  and  all  of  us  had 
exchanged  tales  of  woe — everybody  had  one,  even  Doc- 
tor Ella  Flagg  Young,  the  septuagenarian  Superintend- 
ent of  Chicago's  public  schools,  who  was  chased  out  of 
the  war-zone  across  Scandinavia  into  England — and 
swapped  stories  of  arrest  or  less  thrilling  incon- 
veniences, and  abused  the  incompetent  authorities  of 
the  belligerent  governments  to  our  hearts'  content, 
with  a  slap  now  and  then,  to  vary  the  monotony,  at  our 
own  United  States — the  Campania's  passengers  soon 
shook  down  to  what  turned  out  to  be  as  jolly  a  cross- 


PRO-ALLY   UNCLE    SAM  215 

ing  as  any  of  us,  I  dare  say,  ever  had.  Between  thrills 
about  imaginary  "German  cruisers"  and  equally  fan- 
tastic "rumbling  of  naval  artillery,"  and  our  amusing 
discomforts,  the  week  passed  almost  before  we  knew 
it,  and  more  quickly  than  some  of  us  even  wished. 
There  was,  of  course,  that  irrepressible  Illinois  State 
Senator  who  circulated  a  petition  to  "censure"  the 
Cunard  line  for  not  sending  us  all  home  in  the  Aqui- 
tania,  even  though  the  British  Government  had  requi- 
sitioned her  for  transport  work;  but  a  much  more 
popular  note  was  struck  by  my  young  friend,  Miss 
Marjorie  Rice,  a  typical  New  York  belle,  who  collected 
a  couple  of  hundred  dollars  with  which  to  present  Cap- 
tain Anderson  with  a  souvenir  of  our  gratitude  for 
having  so  gallantly  brought  us  through  invisible  dan- 
gers. German  cruisers  were  still  roaming  in  the 
Atlantic,  and,  though  we  traveled  at  night  with  masked 
lights  and  took  various  other  precautions  like  an  occa- 
sional zigzag  course,  one  never  could  tell,  though  I 
think  most  of  us  banished  all  thought  of  peril  once  we 
heard  that  British  ironclads  were  keeping  a  lane  of 
safety  for  Uncle  Sam's  fretting  sons  and  daughters 
all  the  way  from  Fastnet  to  the  Fire  Island  lightship. 
Asked  by  the  ship's  officers  to  tell  "How  the  Germans 
Went  to  War"  at  the  last-night-out  concert,  to  which 
the  Cunard  Line  with  British  reverence  for  tradition 
still  religiously  adheres,  I  could  confidently  interpret 
the  sentiment  of  every  American  aboard  in  voicing 
deep  thankfulness  for  the  fact  that  Britannia  ruled  the 
waves.  Going  back  with  us  to  the  United  States  was 
a  batch  of  three  or  four  young  Germans,  evidently  of 
university  education,  because  their  jowls  were  em- 
bellished with  saber-cuts.    They  had  been  stopped  in 


216  THE   ASSAULT 

England  on  their  way  home  to  fight,  but  were  gra- 
ciously permitted  to  return  whence  they  came.  Timor- 
ous friends  beseeched  me  to  beware  of  "saying  too 
much"  about  the  Germans  in  the  hearing  of  these 
would-be  soldiers  of  the  Kaiser;  but  I  escaped  molesta- 
tion and  even  heard  next  day  that  I  had  been  "most 
fair." 

Not  till  many  days  after  we  landed  in  New  York 
did  I  know  that  two  very  eminent  representatives  of 
Allied  Powers  were  sandwiched  among  the  Campania's 
home-fleeing  American  passengers — Sir  Cecil  Spring- 
Rice,  British  Ambassador  at  Washington,  and  his  col- 
league of  France,  the  cultured  Monsieur  Jusserand. 
They  had  crossed  in  impenetrable  incognito.  Not  only 
were  their  names  missing  from  the  passenger-list,  but 
if  they  had  ever  promenaded  or  eaten  or  smoked, 
they  must  have  done  it  in  solitary  enjoyment  of 
their  own  exclusive  society,  as  nobody  during  seven 
whole  days  and  nights  ever  heard  of  them  or  saw  them, 
or,  what  is  vastly  more  miraculous  aboard-ship,  ever 
even  talked  about  them.  American  newspapermen 
afloat  in  a  liner  like  to  flatter  themselves  that  nothing 
with  even  the  remotest  odor  of  news  ever  escapes  their 
insatiable  quest.  I  had  myself  bored  with  strenuous 
pertinacity  into  every  news-well  in  the  Campania,  and 
there  were  many.  But  Spring-Rice  and  Jusserand 
eluded  me  as  thoroughly  as  if  they  had  been  contra- 
band stored  away  in  the  hold,  or  stokers  who  only 
come  to  life  out  of  the  black  hole  of  Calcutta  once  or 
twice  a  trip,  when  everybody  with  a  white  face  is  tight 
asleep.  Bernstorff  came  in  two  days  later  like  a  brass 
band.  The  British  and  French  Ambassadors  broke 
into  the  United   States,   apparently,   in   felt-slippers 


PRO-ALLY   UNCLE   SAM  217 

through  a  back  door  on  a  dark  night.  The  manner  of 
the  respective  arrivals  of  the  German  and  the  Allied 
Ambassadors  was  to  be  characteristic  of  their  conduct 
in  the  country  throughout  the  war. 

On  Monday,  August  24,  I  was  lunching  at  the  Ritz- 
Carlton  Hotel.  Bernstorff  had  landed  that  forenoon  in 
the  Dutch  liner,  Noordam.  To  my  astonishment,  the 
Ambassador,  whom  I  had  noticed  lunching  a  few 
tables  away  with  James  Speyer,  arose  and  advanced 
across  the  restaurant  to  where  I  was  sitting.  Bern- 
storff and  I  were  old  acquaintances.  I  liked  him. 
Most  newspapermen  did.  Through  long  residence 
in  Washington,  he  had  acquired  an  almost  Roosevel- 
tian  art  in  dealing  with  us.  I  used  to  see  him  regularly 
during  his  periodical  official  visits  to  Berlin,  having 
known  him  professionally  from  the  days  he  was  Coun- 
cillor of  the  German  Embassy  in  London  during  the 
Boer  War.  Few  Americans  are  aware  that  Count 
Bernstorff  was  born  in  England  while  his  father  was 
serving  as  Prussian  Minister  to  the  Court  of  St.  James. 
History  was  destined  to  repeat  itself  in  the  case  of  the 
son,  who  not  only  adopted  the  career  of  his  father,  but 
when  he  became  an  ambassador  to  a  neutral  country 
during  one  of  Germany's  wars  was  called  upon  to 
occupy  himself  just  as  the  elder  Count  Bernstorff  had 
done  in  London  in  1870-71.  The  father  put  in  most 
of  his  time  in  England  in  a  vain  endeavor  to  persuade 
Queen  Victoria's  Government  to  place  an  embargo  on 
shipment  of  British  arms  and  ammunition  to  the 
French.  He  failed  as  lamentably  in  that  effort  as  his 
son  and  heir  was  destined  to  do  in  the  United  States 
under  almost  identical  circumstances  forty-four  years 
later. 


218  THE   ASSAULT 

Smiling  his  most  persuasive  diplomatic  grimace, 
Count  Bernstorff  went  straight  to  the  object  of  his 
luncheon-table  call  on  me. 

"Wile,"  he  began,  "you've  gone  back  on  us !  I  can 
see  your  hand  at  work  in  the  attitude  the  New  York 
Times  has  taken  up." 

I  could  not  imagine  at  what  the  genial  Count  was 
driving.  Perhaps  he  had  read  in  the  preceding  day's 
Times  my  long  account  of  the  beginnings  of  the  war  as 
I  observed  them  in  Berlin,  or  my  introduction  to  The 
Times'  exclusive  publication  of  the  German  White 
Paper,  printed  that  day. 

"Your  Excellency  flatters  me,"  I  ventured  to  rejoin. 
"I  have  only  been  in  the  country  since  Saturday  night, 
and  my  activities  at  The  Times  office  have  been  limited 
to  the  very  prosaic  duty  of  handing  in  several  wads  of 
'copy'  written  aboard-ship." 

But  Bernstorff  knew  better.  I  had  poisoned  the  at- 
mosphere of  Times  Square  against  Germany's  holy 
cause.  He  insisted  upon  thrusting  upon  me  some  oc- 
cult influence  over  Mr.  Ochs,  The  Times'  able  propri- 
etor, and  Mr.  Miller,  its  brilliant  editor,  and  said  he 
was  going  to  see  somebody  or  other  at  The  Times  later 
in  the  day  and  "fix  things  up."  Judging  by  the  rivers 
of  interviews  which  thenceforth  flowed  in  an  unceas- 
ing torrent  from  the  Ambassador's  headquarters  in  the 
Ritz-Carlton,  he  must  have  seen  not  only  some  Times 
men,  but  nearly  all  the  journalists  in  Greater  New 
York.  How  satisfactorily  he  "fixed  things  up"  with 
the  great  newspaper  which  has  proved  to  be  the  Allies' 
most  consistent  and  effective  supporter  in  the  United 
States  could  be  judged  from  next  morning's  edition, 
which  was  about  as  anti-Bernstorffian  as  could  be  im- 


PRO- ALLY   UNCLE    SAM  219 

agined.  The  Imperial  German  Press-Agent's  palaver 
about  his  ability  to  "fix  things  up"  was  bombast,  pure 
and  unalloyed.  There  was  never  the  slightest  possi- 
bility that  he  could  "fix"  anything  in  the  New  York 
Times  office  or  in  any  American  newspaper  office 
where  self-respect,  journalistic  honor  and  rugged  in- 
dependence are  enthroned.  There  are  American  news- 
papers which  lay  no  claim  to  these  virtues,  and  their 
names  are  undoubtedly,  and  long  have  been,  carefully 
card-indexed  at  1435  Massachusetts  Avenue,  Wash- 
ington, D.  C.  Some  of  their  owners  have  decorations 
bestowed  by  the  Kaiser. 

It  proved  to  be  a  rare  stroke  of  Fate  which  took  me 
to  the  Ritz-Carlton,  for  I  was  destined  to  be  an  eye- 
witness of  the  assemblage  of  the  Kaiser's  Great  Gen- 
eral Staff  for  the  Germanization  of  American  public 
opinion  on  the  war.  Doctor  Dernburg  had  arrived  in 
the  Noordam  with  Count  Bernstorff,  and  along  with 
them  came  Captain  Boy-Ed,  the  Naval  Attache  at 
Washington.  I  knew  personally,  from  Berlin  days,  both 
the  ex-Colonial  Secretary  and  the  sailor.  Dernburg,  be- 
fore he  was  pitchforked  into  Government  office  from 
the  comparatively  humble  station  of  a  bank  director  in 
1906,  was  the  most  approachable  of  men.  His  com- 
mand of  the  American  language  was  remarkable — an 
inheritance  from  his  youth,  part  of  which  was  spent 
as  a  volunteer  clerk  in  a  Wall  Street  bank.  I  never 
forgot  my  first  call  on  him  in  Germany.  I  assumed 
him  to  be  a  Jew,  as  his  father  was.  Some  Semitic 
question  of  public  interest  was  the  news  of  the  mo- 
ment, and  I  regarded  Dernburg  an  ideal  man  to  inter- 
view. With  a  smile  I  recall  how,  insistently  disavow- 
ing his  origin,  he  told  me  I  had  come  to  "the  wrong 


220  THE   ASSAULT 

address."  Later  I  watched  his  tempestuous  career  as 
administrator  of  the  barren  sand-wastes  known  as 
German  colonies,  saw  him  give  electioneering  in  the 
Fatherland  a  new  phase  with  his  shirt-sleeves  cam- 
paigning methods,  and  observed  his  meteoric  rise  to 
Imperial  grace  and  political  power,  so  soon  to  be  fol- 
lowed by  his  equally  precipitate  fall  from  those  dizzy 
heights.  Dernburg's  lack  of  manners  and  tact  was 
commonly  said  in  Berlin  to  have  led  to  his  official 
demise  after  less  than  four  years  of  Cabinet  glory.  No 
one  ever  questioned  his  eminent  ability.  But  his  repu- 
tation as  a  banker  rested  on  cold-blooded  ruthlessness, 
and  when  he  attempted  to  carry  those  methods  into  a 
bureaucratic  government  department,  he  struck  snags 
which  wrecked  his  bark.  Neither  he  nor  I  supposed 
on  August  24,  1914,  when  we  chatted  in  the  palm- 
court  of  the  Ritz-Carlton,  that  his  attempt  to  trans- 
plant Berlin  ruthlessness  into  the  United  States  would 
eventually  prove  his  undoing  there,  too. 

Captain  Boy-Ed,  as  subsequent  history  was  also  to 
show,  was  bent  on  practising  in  America  the  tactics 
which  won  him  renown  and  promotion  in  Germany. 
Prior  to  coming  to  Washington  as  Count  Bernstorff's 
Naval  Attache — the  Kaiser  had  decided  that  the  United 
States  navy  was  attaining  dimensions  which  required 
watching  by  a  shrewd  observer — the  captain  was  von 
Tirpitz'  right-hand  man  at  the  Imperial  Admiralty  in 
Berlin.  He  had  charge  of  the  so-called  News  Divi- 
sion, nominally  entrusted  with  the  duty  of  informing 
the  German  public  of  "routine  naval  intelligence,  such 
as  accidents,  transfers  of  ships  and  officers,  etc.,  etc.," 
as  I  once  heard  von  Tirpitz  persuasively  and  naively 
describe  the  functions  of  the  Nachrichten-Abtcilung 


PRO-ALLY   UNCLE    SAM  221 

during  a  periodical  plea  to  the  Reichstag  for  more 
dreadnoughts.  Boy-Ed,  the  son  of  a  Turkish  father 
and  a  German  mother,  devoted  himself  chiefly  in  the 
years  between  1906  and  1912  to  conducting  von  Tir- 
pitz'  astute  propaganda  for  naval  expansion.  It  was 
the  era  in  which  the  Kaiser's  fleet  was  being  converted 
by  leaps  and  bounds  from  a  navy  of  obsolete  thirteen- 
thousand-ton  ships  of  the  Deutschland  and  Braun- 
schweig class  into  an  armada  of  dreadnoughts  and 
battle  cruisers  of  the  eighteen-thousand  to  twenty- 
four-thousand-ton  "all-big-gun"  Ost-Friesland  and 
Seydlitz  class.  German  public  opinion  required  to  be 
carefully  manipulated  in  order  to  secure  parliamentary 
sanction  for  "supplementary"  appropriations  which 
rose  by  stealthy  degrees  from  $60,000,000  to  $115,- 
000,000  a  year.  Boy-Ed  was  assigned  the  responsible 
duty  of  organizing  and  carrying  out  the  necessary 
campaign  of  education,  and  right  well  and  thoroughly 
he  did  it.  The  shoals  of  pamphlets,  books,  newspaper- 
articles,  public-lectures,  Navy  League  speeches  and 
other  "educational"  matter  with  which  the  Fatherland 
was  flooded — always  with  "England,  the  Foe"  as  the 
leitmotif, — were  to  a  large  extent  the  child  of  Boy- 
Ed's  resourceful  brain.  He  did  not  write  them  all,  of 
course,  but  he  was  their  inspirer-in-chief.  I  account 
him  one  of  the  real  creators  of  the  modern  German 
navy,  second  only  to  von  Tirpitz  himself.  It  was 
"the  chief's"  idea,  but  Boy-Ed  made  its  materialization 
a  practical  possibility. 

Knowing  his  methods,  no  revelations  of  his  perni- 
cious activities  in  the  United  States  ever  surprised  me. 
He  was  only  up  to  his  old  tricks,  altering  them  to  suit 
the  American  climate  and  character,  but  adhering  al- 


222  THE   ASSAULT 

ways  to  certain  basic  principles  which  had  stood  him 
in  such  good  stead  in  the  Fatherland.  It  would  be  un- 
grateful of  me  not  to  acknowledge  numerous  profes- 
sional courtesies  received  at  Boy-Ed's  hands  when  he 
was  misleading  the  press  of  Germany  and  the  world  at 
the  News-Division  in  Leipziger-Platz,  Berlin.  He 
nearly  had  me  arrested  at  the  Imperial  dockyard  in 
Wilhelmshaven  in  March,  1907,  for  gaining  access,  de- 
spite thoroughgoing  preventive  measures,  to  the  launch 
of  Germany's  first  dreadnought,  the  Nassau,  but  dur- 
ing his  career  at  the  Admiralty  he  more  than  made  up 
for  that  by  enabling  me,  in  the  columns  of  The  Daily 
Mail,  to  be  the  medium  of  a  formal  discussion  between 
von  Tirpitz  and  the  British  naval  authorities  on  the 
endlessly  controversial  question  of  Anglo-German  sea 
rivalry.  For  the  best  "copy"  it  was  ever  my  good  for- 
tune to  send  across  the  North  Sea,  my  unwithering 
gratitude  is  due  and  is  hereby  expressed  to  the  shifty 
chieftain  of  Germany's  war-time  "intelligence  service" 
in  the  United  States. 

Who  else  besides  Bernstorff,  Dernburg,  Boy-Ed  and 
Speyer  attended  the  opening  council  of  war  of  the 
German  field-marshals  in  the  United  States  that  broil- 
ing August  day  at  the  Ritz-Carlton,  I  never  learned 
with  certainty.  Dernburg  assured  me  that  as  far  as 
he  was  concerned,  purely  humanitarian  business  had 
brought  him  to  our  generous  shores;  he  had  come  to 
collect  funds  for  the  German  Red  Cross,  and  he  once 
wrote  me  a  letter  on  paper  emblazoned  with  that  worthy 
organization's  innocuous  trade-mark.  I  suspect  that 
before  the  day  was  over,  Professor  Miinsterberg 
of  Harvard,  Poet  Viereck  of  The  Fatherland,  and 
Herman  Ridder  paid  their  respects  to  the  propaganda- 


PRO-ALLY   UNCLE   SAM  223 

chieftains,  and  received  their  orders;  and  probably 
Julius  P.  Mayer,  the  New  York  manager  of  the  Ham- 
burg-American Line,  and  Claussen,  his  expert  "pub- 
licity manager,"  left  their  cards,  too.  Evidently 
James  Speyer  thought  his  sequestered  and  palatial 
home  at  Rhinebeck-on-the-Hudson,  far  from  the  mad- 
ding sleuths  of  the  New  York  press,  was  a  more  ideal 
retreat  for  so  momentous  a  pow-wow,  for  it  was  to 
that  idyllic  refuge  that  Count  Bernstorff  told  me  he  was 
immediately  repairing.  Purely  diplomatic  affairs  at 
Washington  could  obviously  wait  on  the  more  tran- 
scendent business  the  Imperial  German  Ambassador 
now  had  in  hand;  and  before  he  quit  the  banks  of  the 
Hudson  for  the  shores  of  the  Potomac,  the  Father- 
land's marvelous  attack  on  the  natural  sympathies  of 
the  American  Republic  in  the  great  war  was  launched 
with  all  the  force,  skill  and  impudence  of  a  German 
assault  on  the  frontier  of  a  foe. 

New  York  was  clearly  more  feverishly  interested  in 
the  war  than  London.  Nowhere  in  Fleet  Street  had  I 
seen  such  vibrant  throngs  in  front  of  newspaper- 
offices,  as  stood  eager  and  transfixed  by  day  and  far 
into  the  night  in  Times  and  Herald  Squares,  Columbus 
Circle  and  Park  Row.  America  might  have  been  in 
the  fray  herself,  to  judge  by  the  one  absorbing  topic 
which  dominated  men  and  women's  talk  and  obsessed 
their  thoughts.  Detached  as  we  were,  it  was  unmis- 
takable that  Europe's  agony  had  eaten  deep  into  our 
souls,  for  even  the  baseball  bulletin-boards  were  now 
deserted  in  favor  of  those  which  were  telling  in  breath- 
less telegrams  of  the  German  cannon-ball  plunge 
through  Belgium  toward  the  fatal  Marne  and  of  Rus- 
sia's seemingly  irresistible  advance  into  East  Prussia. 


224  THE   ASSAULT 

I  had  heard  no  Englishman  arguing  about  the  issues  of 
Armageddon  or  the  kaleidoscopic  events  of  the  battle- 
field with  half  the  flaming  ardor  of  those  Broadway 
war  experts.  In  fact  there  were  no  blackboards  at  all 
around  which  the  British  could  hold  curbstone  parlia- 
ments, for  Lord  Kitchener's  censorship  was  not  part- 
ing with  news  enough,  apparently,  to  make  even  the 
chalk  worth  while.  In  London  I  had  observed  the  in- 
explicable phenomenon  that  at  the  moment  when  hell 
had  broken  loose  for  the  British  Empire,  great  jour- 
nals, instead  of  deluging  the  public  with  news,  actually 
reduced  their  ordinary  size  in  some  cases  to  four  pages, 
though  I  believe  that  fear  of  a  print-paper  famine  and 
disappearance  of  advertising  had  something  to  do  with 
those  atrophied  dimensions.  All  in  all,  however,  there 
was  no  doubt  that  isolated  neutral  America  was  excited 
about  the  war  to  a  degree  which  reduced  British  in- 
terest almost  to  nonchalance  by  comparison. 

Though  I  tarried  in  the  East  but  forty-eight  hours, 
I  was  conscious  of  breathing  almost  exclusively  pro- 
Ally  air.  President  Wilson's  neutrality  proclamation 
was  being  respected  in  letter,  as  far  as  restraining  our 
people  from  actual  breaches  in  favor  of  either  belliger- 
ent group  was  concerned,  but  every  minute  of  the  day, 
everywhere,  it  was  being  vociferously  violated  in 
spirit.  Before  the  war  was  a  month  old,  Americans 
already  were  confessing  freely  that  they  were  so  "neu- 
tral" that  they  didn't  care  who  won  as  long  as  Ger- 
many was  "licked."  They  resigned  themselves  to  the 
Chief  Magistrate's  dictum  that  the  country  as  such 
must  be  guilty  of  no  "un-neutral"  acts,  but  it  failed 
lamentably  to  still  the  natural  instincts  of  American 


PRO-ALLY   UNCLE   SAM  225 

hearts  which  were  beating  fervently,  irresistibly,  for 
the  Allies.  Bernstorff's  hour-by-hour  interviews,  apol- 
ogies and  explanations,  Miinsterberg's  homilies,  The 
Fatherland's  vituperations,  the  New-Yorker  Staatszei- 
tung's  editorials  in  English  signed  by  Ridder  and 
"boiler-plated"  to  any  newspapers  which  would  give 
them  space,  "fair  play"  appeals  from  obsequious  ex- 
Berlin  exchange-professors  like  Dean  Burgess  of  Co- 
lumbia— all  these  things  fell  on  deaf  ears.  None  of 
them  could  obliterate  the  crime  of  Germany,  which 
loomed  ineradicable  on  the  war  horizon  as  Americans 
scanned  it — Belgium.  All  the  instincts  of  American 
justice,  liberty,  humanity  and  regard  for  treaty  obliga- 
tions rebelled  against  "Necessity-knows-no-law"  and 
"scrap  of  paper"  ethics.  We  had  gone  to  war  our- 
selves, in  1898,  to  defend  the  rights  of  a  small  nation. 
The  spectacle  of  Military  Germany  trampling  little 
Belgium  under  foot,  causelessly,  mercilessly,  was 
enough,  had  there  been  no  other  single  issue  to  en- 
list our  sympathy,  to  vouchsafe  it,  whole-heartedly,  to 
the  nations  which  were  leagued  in  support  of  the  old- 
fashioned  principle  that  Right  is  nobler  than  Might. 
Thus  was  America's  mind  attuned  in  August,  1914, 
and  at  least  in  the  opinion-molding  area  of  the  coun- 
try which  lies  between  the  seaboard  and  the  line  where 
the  Middle  West  begins,  that  mind  was,  with  Ameri- 
can predilection  for  reaching  right  conclusions  spon- 
taneously, irrevocably  made  up.  The  attempts  of  the 
Propaganda  Steam-Roller  to  flatten  out  the  anti-Ger- 
man prejudices  provoked  by  the  rape  of  Belgium  were 
frantic,  but  fruitless.  The  pre-digested  baby  food 
which    pedagogues    and    demagogues,  ambassadors, 


226  JHE   ASSAULT, 

brewers  and  rabbis  now  began  to  ladle  out  for  Ameri- 
can consumption  did  not  temper  those  prejudices.  In- 
deed, it  was  manifest  that  it  was  but  aggravating  them. 
Our  own  General  Brooke,  attending  the  German 
army  maneuvers  in  Silesia  eight  or  nine  years  ago, 
was  asked  by  the  Kaiser  if  he  had  ever  been  in  Ger- 
many before.  "Never  in  this  part,"  remarked  Brooke. 
"Where,  then?"  persisted  William  II.  "In  Cincinnati, 
Chicago  and  Milwaukee,"  replied  the  general.  I  was 
about  to  enter  "that  part"  of  Germany  now.  I  was  not 
there  long  before  realizing  that  pro- Ally  sentiment  was 
immeasurably  less  assertive,  at  any  rate,  than  in  the 
outspokenly  pro- Ally  East.  Chicago,  of  course,  has 
more  Germans  than  Diisseldorf,  and  Cincinnati  and 
Milwaukee,  in  spots,  are  as  Teutonic  as  Hamburg  or 
Bremen,  so  it  was  natural  to  find  Deutschland, 
Deutschland  uber  Alles  more  than  disputing  suprem- 
acy with  Rule  Britannia.  In  Chicago  pro-German- 
ism was  rampant  and  articulate.  An  article  written  by 
me  for  the  Chicago  Tribune  in  the  first  fortnight  of 
September,  in  which  I  ventured  to  express  my  opinion 
as  to  where  the  responsibility  for  the  war  lay,  how  long 
it  would  last  and  who  would  win  it,  brought  down  on 
me  as  violent  a  torrent  of  abuse  as  if  it  had  been  pub- 
lished in  the  Berliner  Tageblatt.  For  saying  that,  in 
my  judgment,  the  German  War  Party  had  made  the 
war;  that  it  would  go  on  till  Germany  was  beaten  to 
her  knees,  and  that  eventual  exhaustion  of  the  Ger- 
manic Powers  and  the  longer  resources  of  the  Allies 
would  win  the  war  for  the  latter,  I  became  forthwith 
the  target  of  all  the  forty-two-centimeter  guns  in  the 
Windy  City. 


CHAPTER  XV 

THE   HELMSMEN 

"We  don't  want  to  fight, 
But,  by  Jingo !  if  we  do, 
We've  got  the  men, 
We've  got  the  ships, 
And  we've  got  the  money,  too !" 

WHEN  during  the  dark  hours  of  the  Russo- 
Turkish  War  in  1877  a  London  music-hall 
comedian  named  McDermott  popularized  the  chorus 
of  a  ditty  which  has  rung  down  the  ages,  he  not  only 
enriched  the  English  language  with  a  new  synonym 
for  a  war  zealot — Jingo — but  he  epitomized  British 
faith  in  British  invincibility  and  the  basis  on  which  it 
is  founded.  McDermott's  blustering  ballad,  the  Tip- 
perary  of  its  day,  interpreted,  by  a  fate  which  seems 
strangely  ironical  in  the  light  of  current  events,  Brit- 
ain's determination  to  go  to  war  to  prevent  the  Bear 
from  grabbing  Constantinople. 

The  song  applied  precisely  to  conditions  in  this 
country  in  midsummer,  1914.  Englishmen  "didn't 
want  to  fight" — abroad,  at  least,  for  they  were  looking 
forward  to  cooling  their  belligerent  ardor  nearer  home, 
in  Ireland.  But  when  the  violation  of  Belgium 
resolved  all  dissension  in  the  British  Government 
on  the  question  of  intervention  in  a  conflict  which, 

227 


228  THE   ASSAULT 

up  to  then,  concerned  purely  the  Dual  and  Triple 
Alliances,  and  literally  dragged  Britain  into  the  vortex 
in  the  name  of  both  her  honor  and  interest,  Englishmen 
did  want  to  fight.  Taking  quick  stock  of  their  re- 
sources, they  felt  assured,  in  McDermott's  immortal 
words,  that  they  had  "got  the  men,  the  ships,  and  the 
money,  too."  But  men,  ships  and  money,  vital  as  they 
are,  are  useless  without  leaders,  and  it  was  natural  that 
Britons'  first  thoughts,  in  the  dawn  of  the  Empire's 
supreme  emergency,  should  be  concerned  with  the  per- 
sonnel of  the  helmsmen.  A  super-crisis  calls  in- 
sistently for  super-men,  and  in  the  midst  of  an  era 
which  cynics  call  the  age  of  mediocrities  doubts  were 
not  few  that  England  might  find  herself  fatally  lacking 
in  a  plight  as  stupendous  as  any  Pitt,  Nelson  and  Wel- 
lington had  ever  faced. 

With  their  astonishing  capacity  to  stifle  domestic 
controversy  and  party  bickerings  on  the  threshold  of  a 
foreign  crisis,  Englishmen  decided  that  the  first  essen- 
tial was  to  repose  implicit  confidence  in  the  existing 
Government.  Ireland,  Labor,  Suffragettes,  Opposi- 
tion, the  four  thorns  in  the  Asquith  Administration's 
side,  withdrew,  leaving  the  cleavage  they  once  made  so 
completely  healed  that  hardly  a  scar  remained.  The 
Liberal  Cabinet,  admittedly  stale  with  nearly  a  decade 
of  uninterrupted  power,  might  not  contain  all  the  tal- 
ents of  statesmanship  essential  for  the  conduct  of  a 
struggle  on  whose  issue  hung  Imperial  existence.  It 
was  a  Government  overweighted  with  "tired  lawyers," 
consisting  (with  the  exception  of  Lord  Kitchener)  of 
exclusively  professional  politicians,  and  even  tinged  in 
important  directions  (like  Lord  Haldane)  with  con- 
fessed Germanophilism.     It  was  a  Government  long 


THE   HELMSMEN  229 

and  openly  charged  by  its  foes  with  desiring  office  at 
any  cost  and  placing  the  perpetuation  of  its  hold  on  the 
fleshpots  before  any  other  interest.  It  was  a  Govern- 
ment which  had  avowedly  temporized  with  the  Irish 
yesterday  and  the  Labor  Party  to-day  as  the  price  of 
maintaining  its  Parliamentary  existence.  It  was  finally 
a  Government  notoriously  consisting  of  rival  internal 
factions  best  typified  by  the  aristocratic  Imperialism 
of  Sir  Edward  Grey  on  the  one  hand  and  on  the  other 
by  the  rugged  and  radical  Democracy  of  Mr.  Lloyd- 
George.  Yet  the  nation,  in  the  presence  of  peril  pal- 
pably incalculable,  relegated  its  criticisms,'  its  doubts 
and  its  carpings,  and  with  one  voice  agreed  that  "Trust 
the  Government !"  must  be  the  slogan  of  the  hour.  The 
Anglo-Saxon  spirit  of  Fair  Play  asserted  itself.  The 
country  said  that  the  Asquith  Administration  must  be 
given  a  chance  to  exhibit  its  mettle.  If  it  failed,  there 
was  always  time  for  a  reckoning.  The  British  Gov- 
ernment of  August,  1914,  entered  upon  the  war  clothed 
with  a  mandate  as  sweeping  in  its  powers  as  formal 
conferment  of  a  Dictatorship  could  have  been — a  woof 
of  national  confidence  amounting  to  little  short  of  carte 
blanche.  John  Bright  once  said  that  a  British  Govern- 
ment is  always  annihilated  by  the  war  which  it  is  called 
upon  to  wage.  But  Englishmen  wished  Mr.  Asquith's 
Cabinet  Godspeed,  and  by  their  unquestioning  support 
of  every  measure  it  proposed  showed  that  their  loyalty 
and  trust  were  real  and  sincere. 

Although  the  British  Government  (by  which  is 
meant  only  the  Premier's  Administration)  consists  of 
twenty-one  ministers  of  Cabinet  rank,  the  war  regime, 
it  was  manifest  from  the  start,  would  be  confined  to 
five  outstanding  men  combining  the  motive  forces  of 


230  THE  ASSAULT 

the  entire  organization.  These  five  were  the  Prime 
Minister  himself,  the  Foreign  Secretary  (Sir  Edward 
Grey),  the  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer  (Mr.  Lloyd- 
George),  the  First  Lord  of  the  Admiralty  (Mr.  Win- 
ston Churchill),  and  the  Secretary  for  War  (Lord 
Kitchener) .  Although  the  highest-salaried  member  of 
the  Cabinet,  the  Lord  High  Chancellor  (Lord  Hal- 
dane)  drew  ten  thousand  pounds  a  year,  and  there  were 
half-a-dozen  others  like  the  Home  Secretary,  the  Co- 
lonial Secretary,  the  Secretary  for  India  and  the  Presi- 
dents of  the  Board  of  Trade  and  Local  Government 
Board  whose  financial  status  (five  thousand  pounds  a 
year),  outranked  the  four  thousand  five  hundred 
pounds  which  Mr.  Churchill  received,  the  quintette 
named,  by  reason  of  their  posts  and  personalities,  was 
the  logical  inner  Government  to  deal  with  the  war. 
That  brilliant  English  essayist  and  biographer,  Mr.  A. 
G.  Gardiner,  even  further  delimited  the  numerical  di- 
mensions of  the  real  War  Government  when  he  said 
that  "if  Mr.  Asquith  is  the  brain  of  the  Cabinet,  Sir 
Edward  Grey  is  its  character  and  Mr.  Lloyd-George  is 
its  inspiration." 

Herbert  Henry  Asquith,  Yorkshireman  by  birth 
and  barrister  by  profession,  has  been  Prime  Minister 
for  seven  years,  succeeding  his  late  Liberal  chieftain, 
Sir  Henry  Campbell-Bannerman,  in  1908.  Asquith, 
whom  Bannerman  used  to  call  "the  sledge-hammer," 
because  of  his  lucidity  of  thought  and  expression,  was 
sixty-three  years  old  in  September,  1915.  Although 
not  a  Pitt,  nor  even  a  Disraeli  or  Palmerston,  the 
statesman  who  looks  like  a  Roman  senator  and  is 
gifted  with  eloquence  in  keeping  was  considered  in 
many  respects  a  Heaven-sent  blessing  in  the  melting- 


Copyright,  Underwood  and  Underwood. 
Herbert  Henry  Asquith. 


THE    HELMSMEN  231 

pot  era  of  British  history,  for  as  a  purely  steadying  in- 
fluence he  is  probably  without  a  peer  in  contemporary 
politics.  As  a  politician  in  the  narrower  sense  of  a 
party  disciplinarian,  manager  and  leader  he  will  rank 
with  the  craftiest  names  in  his  country's  tortuous  his- 
tory. British  Liberalism  has  skated  on  perilous  ice 
following  the  reaction  which  swept  the  Conservative 
Party  from  power  after  the  Boer  War  and  throughout 
the  era  of  Democratic  radicalism  in  which  Great  Brit- 
ain has  meantime  had  its  being.  That  Mr.  Asquith's 
party  is  enabled  to  celebrate  ten  years  of  sovereignty 
still  strongly  intrenched  is  by  general  consent  due  to 
the  astute  generalship  of  its  commander-in-chief.  As- 
quith  is  not  commonly  accused  of  imaginativeness.  He 
is  too  typical  a  British  statesman  for  that.  His  tem- 
perament is  devoid  of  the  adventurous,  like  that  of  the 
true  intellectual,  and  he  is  pathologically  fonder  of 
harking  to  public  opinion  than  boldly  leading  it.  When 
he  coined  the  "Wait  and  See"  epigram  during  the 
Ulster  crisis,  he  gave  utterance  to  a  phrase  which  ac- 
curately epitomizes  the  tentativeness  so  preponderant 
in  his  political  career.  British  procrastination  and 
vacillation  at  vital  periods  of  the  war  were  undoubtedly 
the  reflex  action  of  the  Prime  Minister's  own  low-speed 
mental  processes.  Yet  in  the  revolt  of  the  Curragh 
Camp  officers,  that  strange  curtain-raiser  of  the  im- 
pending Ulster  crisis,  which  threatened  to  embroil 
these  fair  isles  in  another  Cromwellian  trial  of  strength 
between  Parliament  and  the  army,  Mr.  Asquith,  by  a 
courageous  stroke  of  positive  genius — his  own  assump- 
tion of  the  Secretaryship  for  War  in  succession  to  the 
compromised  Colonel  Seely — resolved  into  tranquillity 
and  hope  a  situation  more  menacing  to  civil  peace  in 


232  THE   ASSAULT 

England  than  living  Britons  had  ever  before  lived 
through.  Beneath  Mr.  Asquith's  polished  exterior, 
unemotional  mask  and  sweet  reasonableness  Germany, 
mistaking  his  for  a  peace-at-any-price  nature,  made 
one  of  the  most  egregious  of  her  numerous  and  glaring 
miscalculations. 

Only  the  results  of  the  Peace  Conference  will  deter- 
mine the  true  ramifications  of  Sir  Edward  Grey's  rep- 
utation. It  was  deservedly  high  when  the  war  began. 
No  Foreign  Secretary  in  Europe  approached  him  in 
stature,  with  the  possible  exception  of  Delcasse.  He 
had  long  been  Germany's  bete  noire,  being  looked  upon 
as  the  incarnation  of  the  British  diplomatic  policy  of 
blocking  German  ambitions  for  a  "place  in  the  sun" 
wherever  and  whenever  they  manifested  themselves. 
As  long  before  as  December,  1912,  Professor  Hans 
Delbriick,  the  sanest  of  German  political  professors, 
told  me  in  a  prophetic  interview  for  The  Daily  Mail  on 
"What  Germany  Wants"  that  unless  England  aban- 
doned her  policy  of  "arbitrary  opposition  to  legitimate 
German  political  aspirations;  if  she  had  no  inclination 
to  meet  us  on  that  ground;  if  her  interests  rather 
pointed  to  a  perpetuation  of  the  anything-to-beat-Ger- 
many  policy,  so  let  it  be.  The  Armageddon  which 
must  then,  some  day,  ensue  will  not  be  of  our  making." 
That  was  a  fairly  plain  warning  of  coming  events. 
The  Germans,  as  I  have  said,  considered  Sir  Edward 
Grey  anti-Germanism  personified.  They  regard  him 
to-day  as  the  "organizer  of  the  war."  Taking  an  obvi- 
ously short-sighted  view,  I  used  sometimes  to  think 
that  it  would  have  been  good  politics  for  Britain  to 
buy  off  Germany  with  a  Trinkgeld  (tip)  of  some  sort. 
If  Bismarck  was  right  when  he  called  the  Germans  "a 


THE   HELMSMEN  233 

nation  of  house-servants,"  they  could  obviously  have 
been  bribed.  Delbriick  himself  once  confessed  to  me 
that  Germany  did  not  need  more  oversea  territory; 
she  only  hankered  for  it  for  window-dressing  pur- 
poses. She  wanted  as  expensive  millinery  and  high- 
powered  a  car  as  her  rich  neighbor  across  the  way. 
Colonies  were  fashionable,  and  she  had  to  have  them. 
I  occasionally  thought  that  England  would  be  staving 
off  trouble  for  herself  by  bribing  avaricious  Germany 
with  a  coaling-station  on  some  inconsequential  trade- 
route  or  even  shutting  the  eye  to  some  burglarious 
descent  on  territory  or  concessions  in  Asia  Minor  or 
Central  Africa.  But  such  notions  left  the  German 
character,  the  Oliver  Twist  in  it,  fatally  out  of  account. 
The  German  is  the  most  eager  person  in  the  world  to 
covet  a  mile  if  given  an  inch.  Concessions  to  his  ra- 
pacity would  have  meant  purchasing  turmoil  for  the 
conceding  party  not  eliminating  it.  British  opposition 
to  Pan-Germanic  designs,  typified  by  Sir  Edward  Grey, 
was  based  on  thoroughgoing  insight  into  the  German 
nature  and  German  ambitions,  epitomized  for  all  time 
by  Bernhardi  when  he  said  that  nothing  would  appease 
the  Fatherland  except  World  Power  or  downfall. 
Hush-money  to  Germany  in  the  shape  of  periodically 
new  "places  in  the  sun"  would  have  kept  her  quiet  for 
spells.  But  the  blackmailing  process  would  have  been 
resumed.  It  is  the  German  way.  "Mr.  Balfour  tells 
us  we  must  not  expect  Englishmen  to  support  our  aims 
in  the  direction  of  territorial  expansion,"  said  Del- 
briick. "What  remains  then  for  us,  except  to  enforce 
the  accomplishment  of  our  purposes  by  strengthened 
armaments?"  Could  avowal  be  plainer-spoken? 
Sir  Edward  Grey  is  fifty-three  years  old  and  has 


234  THE  ASSAULT 

been  a  childless  widower  since  1906.  He  has  been  a 
Member  of  Parliament  continuously  since  he  was 
twenty-three  years  of  age.  Though  an  Oxford  grad- 
uate and  successful  barrister,  he  is  in  no  sense  a  scholar, 
and  his  experience  of  foreign  affairs  up  to  his  becoming 
Foreign  Secretary  in  the  Campbell-Bannerman  minis- 
try in  1905  was  confined  to  an  under-secretaryship  of 
the  Foreign  Office  in  the  preceding  (Rosebery)  Gov- 
ernment. Grey,  who  is  also  of  the  smooth-shaven  Ro- 
manesque type  of  statesman  in  external  appearance,  is 
an  amazing  example  of  natural  British  aptitude  for  the 
higher  politics,  for  he  is  not  a  linguist  (he  speaks  noth- 
ing but  English)  and  except  for  a  visit  to  France  with 
the  present  King  a  couple  of  years  ago  was  said  never 
to  have  been  abroad  in  his  life.  His  hobbies  are  tennis, 
fly-fishing  and  birds.  The  only  book  he  ever  wrote 
was  a  treatise  on  the  piscatory  art  and  he  tramped 
through  the  New  Forest  with  Colonel  Roosevelt  talking 
ornithology  all  the  way.  Yet  a  man  has  only  to  read 
the  British  White  Paper — he  need  not,  indeed,  do 
much  except  read  Sir  Edward  Grey's  dispatches  to  his 
ambassadors  on  July  29,  1914 — to  realize  that  the 
Foreign  Secretary  is  a  statesman  of  marvelous  force 
and  capacity  to  grapple  with  the  essentials  of  a  situa- 
tion. No  state  papers  of  modern  times  outrival  Grey's 
diplomatic  correspondence  on  the  eve  of  the  war.  They 
ought  to  insure  him,  as  I  believe  they  will,  immortality, 
no  matter  how  the  war  ends.  Sir  Edward  Grey's 
speeches  are  like  his  dispatches — devoid  of  irrelevancy 
or  rhetorical  claptrap  and  incisive  in  the  highest  de- 
gree. They  ring  conviction  and  sincerity  and  their 
argument  is  usually  unanswerable.  Doctor  von  Beth- 
mann  Hollweg's  clumsy  attempts  to  parry  Grey's  mid- 


THE    HELMSMEN  235 

bellum  dialectics  have  only  brought  out  the  latter  in 
bolder  relief.  The  war  has  notoriously  eaten  into 
Grey's  soul.  Germany  calls  it  guilty  remorse.  Men 
who  know  are  conscious  that  he  labored  for  peace  to 
the  last  minute  with  unflagging  enthusiasm.  His  in- 
dustry during  the  war  has  been  intense,  and  his  insist- 
ence upon  looking  at  things  for  himself  has  threatened 
more  than  once  to  cost  him  his  eyesight.  As  it  is, 
intermittent  relaxation  has  to  be  forced  upon  him  by 
his  colleagues  and  his  medical  advisers.  Sir  Edward 
Grey's  permanent  disappearance  from  Downing  Street 
would  rejoice  Germany  like  a  victorious  battle.  Grey 
has  been  violently  blamed  for  the  failure  of  Britain's 
mid-war  diplomacy,  especially  in  the  Balkans.  His 
own  defense  against  charges  of  failure  in  that  region 
is  likely  to  seem  plausible  in  the  light  of  history,  viz., 
that,  unaccompanied  by  commensurate  military  suc- 
cesses, the  efforts  of  Allied  diplomacy  in  the  Near  East 
were  almost  hopelessly  handicapped. 

One  night  during  the  South  African  War  a  Radical 
M.  P.,  advocating  the  downtrodden  brother  Boer's 
cause  at  a  mass-meeting  in  Birmingham,  received  such 
a  warm  reception  from  the  crowd  that  he  had  to  flee 
for  his  life  through  a  back-door,  disguised  as  a  police- 
man. His  name  was  David  Lloyd-George,  whose  pres- 
ent occupation  is  that  of  England's  man  of  the  hour. 
He  was  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer  when  war  broke 
out  and  introduced  the  initial  war  budgets,  earning 
thereby  encomiums  from  the  financial  community 
which  for  years  before  looked  upon  him  as  capital's 
demagogic  arch-foe.  To-day,  Minister  of  Munitions 
— the  circumstances  under  which  he  became  such  are 
.treated  in  a  subsequent  chapter — Lloyd-George  comes 


236  THE   ASSAULT 

far  nearer  being  Britain's  national  hero  than  any  of 
his  contemporaries.  He  is  charged  by  his  detractors 
with  the  design  to  make  himself  Dictator.  England 
could  have  a  worse  one. 

If  Lloyd-George  were  an  American  instead  of  a 
Welshman,  he  would  have  been  President  of  the  United 
States  by  this  time,  or  at  least  as  close  to'  it  as  Bryan 
has  ever  been.  There  is  in  fact  very  little  typically 
British  about  him.  He  is  emotional,  for  example,  and 
he  has  an  imagination.  His  whole  make-up  is  trans- 
atlantic, which  is  Anglice  for  sensational.  Picture,  if 
you  can,  a  strong  solution  of  Booker  Washington  (I 
mean,  of  course,  only  his  eloquence),  of  flamboyant 
and  appealing  Billy  Sunday,  of  the  Boy  Orator  of  the 
Platte  at  his  silver-tongued  best,  and  of  our  inimitable 
T.  R.  in  his  most  rampageous  form,  and  you  will  have 
Lloyd-George  in  composite.  It  was  because  he  is  all 
this  that  he  was  chosen  for  the  "shells  portfolio"  in  the 
reconstructed  Asquith  cabinet. 

He  knew  very  little — probably  nothing — about  mu- 
nitions seven  months  ago.  It  could  not  have  been  very 
much  before  that  when  he  probably  thought  that  gun- 
cotton  was  raw  material  for  pajamas.  But  he  is  the 
prize  "enthuser"  of  the  Kingdom,  a  master  of  the  tedi- 
ous art  of  welding  drowsy  Britons  into  a  race  of  real 
war-makers.  All  the  ingredients  for  supplying  the 
army  with  the  shells  it  needed  were  in  existence;  but 
they  needed  organization.  The  manufacturers  and 
their  works  needed  organization.  The  workmen 
needed  organization.  The  public  spirit  needed  or- 
ganization; and  the  whole  business  needed  a  Lloyd- 
George.  It  got  him  ten  months  after  it  ought  to 
have  had  him,  but  not  too  late.     Obviously  the  di- 


Copyright,  Underwood  and  Underwood. 
Lloyd-George. 


JHE   HELMSMEN  217, 

minutive  Welsh  country  lawyer  who  had  brought 
about  the  disestablishment  of  the  State  Church  of 
Wales,  imposed  State  Insurance  and  Old  Age  Pen- 
sions on  a  reluctant  Kingdom,  assailed  the  vested  in- 
terests of  the  House  of  Lords  and  demolished  them, 
was  the  man  to  impress  the  country  with  the  true 
meaning  of  the  shells  tragedy.  He  took  the  stump,  his 
natural  element,  for  the  purpose.  He  went  to  the 
people,  especially  in  the  great  industrial  centers,  and 
told  them  the  truth.  He  burned  into  their  conscience 
— that  was  the  only  way  to  get  the  stolid  British  to 
wake  up  to  a  real  peril — that  shells,  shells,  and  then 
shells,  and  nothing  but  shells,  were  required  if  Britain 
meant  to  win  the  war. 

The  people  listened  to  Lloyd-George.  He  has  a  way 
of  making  them  listen  to  him.  They  gave  him  their 
ear  even  in  his  pro-Boer  days.  They  listened  to  him 
when  he  (an  ardent  Baptist)  cleared  for  action  against 
the  Welsh  Church.  They  listened  to  him  even  when 
he  went  down  to  Limehouse  and  coined  a  new  word, 
"to  limehouse,"  meaning  violent  political  spell-binding, 
second  cousin  to  demagogism,  by  the  nature  of  his 
impassioned  appeals  to  the  people  to  rise  and  slay  the 
Lords.  It  was  inevitable  that  the  country  would  listen 
to  him  in  his  newest  and  greatest  role  as  organizer  of 
victory. 

Lloyd-George's  goal  is  undoubtedly  the  Premiership 
-^the  ambition  of  every  British  politician.  He  has 
plenty  of  time  to  wait — he  is  only  fifty-two — and  un- 
failing week-end  golf  keeps  him  as  "fit"  as  a  man  fif- 
teen years  his  junior.  Of  Napoleonic  stockiness  of 
build,  with  a  wealth  of  wavy  gray  hair  worn  long,  he  is 
a  figure  which  radiates  strength  and  power,  though  un- 


238  THE   ASSAULT 

impressive  of  itself.  He  is  a  capital  "mixer."  It  is, 
indeed,  his  principal  political  asset.  He  is  as  much  at 
home  laboring  with  a  gang  of  recalcitrant  miners  at 
the  pit-mouth — he  always  goes  straight  to  headquar- 
ters when  he  essays  to  settle  a  strike — as  he  is  on  the 
floor  of  the  House  of  Commons  or  as  moderator  at  a 
Baptist  convention.  He  likes  Americans  and  special- 
izes in  extending  hospitality  to  interesting  ones.  Un- 
questionably he  has  a  strong  hold  on  our  imaginations, 
as  a  man  of  his  temperament,  career  and  talent  is 
bound  to  have.  An  eminent  Chicagoan  visited  London 
last  summer,  with  introductions  which  would  have 
easily  paved  his  way  to  the  throne  or  any  other  ex- 
alted British  quarter.  "Whom  would  you  like  to  meet 
most  of  all?"  he  was  asked.  "Lloyd-George,"  he 
said,  with  the  intuitive  sense  of  a  Yankee  who  only  has 
time  for  the  things  worth  while. 

Winston  Churchill,  the  son  of  an  English  father 
and  an  American  mother,  is  the  Peck's  Bad  Boy  of  the 
British  Government.  His  popularity  has  been  sadly 
dimmed  since  the  war  began,  for  he  was  looked  upon 
as  not  only  the  author  of  the  grotesque  naval  "relief" 
expedition  to  Antwerp — now  either  prisoners  of  war 
in  Germany  or  interned  in  Holland — but  the  cul- 
prit who  was  chiefly  responsible  for  the  far  more 
disastrous  Dardanelles  adventure.  Another  crime  is 
charged  against  him,  hardly  less  serious  than  the  two 
just  named :  his  imperious  administration  of  the  Ad- 
miralty drove  from  the  First  Sea  Lordship  the  man 
universally  considered  Britain's  greatest  sailor,  Lord 
Fisher.  All  agree,  friend  and  foe,  that  to  "Winston" 
was  due  in  a  very  marked  degree,  England's  superb 
readiness  at  sea  when  war  broke  out,  but  it  is  a  matter 


THE   HELMSMEN  239 

of  grave  doubt  whether  even  that  superlative  service  to 
the  country  will  be  looked  upon  as  great  enough  to 
blanket  his  subsequent  and  costly  incompetencies. 
When  the  upheaval  in  the  Asquith  Cabinet  came  about, 
in  the  spring  of  1915,  Churchill  was  nominally 
squelched  by  interment  in  the  harmless  berth  of  the 
Chancellor  of  the  Duchy  of  Lancaster,  most  of  whose 
official  time  is  spent  in  licensing  Justices  of  the  Peace 
and  Notaries  Public.  That  ennui  hung  heavily  on  his 
hands  was  manifested  by  the  announcement  during  the 
summer  that  Churchill  had  taken  up  painting  as  a 
pastime. 

I  have  said  that  "Winston"  was  nominally  subju- 
gated, for  a  petrel  of  his  peculiarly  irrepressible  storm- 
iness  can  only  be  wholly  curbed  by  annihilation.  As- 
quith is  far  too  sagacious  a  politician  to  risk  Churchill's 
complete  eclipse  in  the  Government  of  which  he 
has  always  been  the  most  picturesque  constituent. 
Churchill,  too,  aspires  to  the  Premier's  toga,  though  a 
good  many  people  fear  that  the  defects  of  his  qualities 
will  keep  him,  just  as  they  kept  his  distinguished 
father,  Lord  Randolph  Churchill,  from  No.  10  Down- 
ing Street.  But  "Winston"  is  far  less  dangerous  to 
the  Government  as  a  friend  than  as  a  foe.  His  chame- 
leon political  career  justifies  the  fear  that  he  would 
turn  on  his  old  associates  and  party  cronies  the  mo- 
ment he  conceived  that  advantage  to  self  was  thereby 
obtainable.  Obviously  such  a  man  is  better  in  the 
Cabinet  than  out  of  it,  especially  if  he  is  of  Winston 
Churchill's  undoubted  personal  charm,  magnetism  and 
resistless  force. 

Combining  the  best  qualities  of  his  dual  ancestry,  he 
makes  a  lively  appeal  to  the  average  heart.     Aristo- 


240  THE   ASSAULT 

cratic  to  the  core,  with  the  blood  of  the  Marlboroughs 
in  his  veins,  and  a  snob  of  snobs  in  his  personal  rela- 
tions, it  is  an  anomalous  fact  that  Churchill  is  an  end- 
lessly popular  figure  with  the  crowd.  Whether  it  is 
his  youth — he  is  only  forty-one,  was  a  soldier  of  no 
mean  renown  at  twenty-three,  a  Member  of  Parliament 
at  twenty-six,  a  Cabinet  Minister  at  thirty-two  and  a 
force  in  Imperial  politics  long  before  he  was  forty — 
or  his  impetuous  devil-may-care  make-up,  or  his 
bombastic  platform  style,  the  masses  like  him.  He 
has  only  one  serious  rival,  indeed,  in  their  affec- 
tions, and  that  is  Lloyd-George.  He  is  remem- 
bered in  war  thus  far  not  only  for  his  Antwerp 
and  Dardanelles  indiscretions,  but  for  his  equally  un- 
happy oratorical  excesses,  which  are  doomed,  appar- 
ently, always  to  precede  some  untoward  naval  or  mili- 
tary event.  Within  thirty-six  hours  of  proclaiming  at 
Liverpool  (in  September,  1914)  that  "if  the  German 
navy  does  not  come  out  and  fight,  we  shall  dig  it  out 
like  rats  from  a  hole,"  Up  sent  the  Cressy,  Hogue  and 
Aboukir  to  the  bottom.  In  the  spring  of  1915,  dis- 
cussing the  Dardanelles,  Churchill  blustered  that  "we 
are  within  a  very  few  miles  of  the  greatest  victory  this 
war  has  seen,"  and  a  few  weeks  later  Kitchener  an- 
nounced that  twelve  miles  of  precarious  front  in  Gal- 
lipoli  were  all  there  was  to  show  for  a  campaign  which 
had  already  cost  eighty-seven  thousand  casualties. 
When  Churchill  prognosticates  nowadays,  the  country 
trembles  for  what  the  next  day  will  bring  forth.  Yet 
he  is  a  rash  prophet  who  would  predict  that  "Winston" 
has  run  his  course  in  British  politics.  He  took  manfully 
the  discomfiture  of  the  Coalition  reshuffle,  and  al- 
though his  picture  is  no  longer  cheered  when  it  is 


THE   HELMSMEN  241 

flashed  on  the  cinematograph   screen   the    shrewdest 
seers  are  certain  that  he  will  "come  back."* 

Lord  Kitchener  has  always  boasted  that  he  scorned 
popularity.  He  has  need  for  his  philosophical  temper- 
ament to-day,  for  there  is  no  manner  of  doubt  that  his 
hold  on  the  imaginations  of  his  countrymen  is  less 
firm  than  it  was  when  the  war  began.  "K.'s"  dramatic 
appointment  to  the  War  Office,  in  the  earliest  hours  of 
the  conflict,  heartened  the  nation  to  an  extraordinary 
degree.  Britain  had  no  army,  Englishmen  said,  but  it 
had  Kitchener,  who  was  a  host  in  himself.  His  name 
alone  was  an  asset  which  bred  indescribable  confidence. 
Men  recalled  his  dominant  traits — iron  determination, 
strenuous  application  to  duty,  imperious  disregard  of 
hide-bound  methods  and  red  tape,  and,  above  all,  his 
genius  for  organization.  They  rejoiced  to  hear  that 
he  had  accepted  the  War  Office,  long  cob-webbed  with 
circumlocutory  traditions  and  petticoat  influence,  on 
the  strict  understanding  that  he  was  to  be  monarch  of 
all  he  surveyed — that  he  would  not  tolerate  such  party 
interference  as  intrudes  itself  on  departmental  affairs 
in  general.  Immensely  to  the  popular  taste,  because  it 
confirmed  the  masses'  conception  of  "K.,"  was  the 
story  that  when  he  arrived  at  the  War  Office  for  the 
first  time  and  was  told  there  was  "no  bed  here,  Sir," 
he  commanded  the  affrighted  and  astonished  caretaker, 
then,  "to  put  one  in,  as  I  am  going  to  sleep  here." 


♦Churchill  resigned  from  the  Cabinet  in  November,  1915,  de- 
claring that  he  was  a  soldier — "and  my  regiment  is  in  France." 
To  it  he  said  he  preferred  to  go  rather  than  continue  in  a  posi- 
tion of  "well-paid  inactivity  at  home.  In  a  dramatic  speech  in 
the  House  of  Commons,  he  took  political  farewell  of  the  country 
and,  having  pleaded  "Not  Guilty"  to  the  capital  charges  of 
responsibility  for  Antwerp  and  the  Dardanelles,  left  England 
unostentatiously  for  the  trenches,  as  a  major  of  cavalry. 


242  THE   ASSAULT 

Britain  said  to  herself  that  she  indubitably  possessed 
a  match  for  German  Efficiency  in  her  new  Secretary 
for  War,  and  all  thought  of  "losing"  with  such  a  man 
as  the  supreme  chief  of  the  military  establishment  van- 
ished from  her  mind. 

Kitchener  was  never  one  of  the  war-will-be-over-by- 
Christmas  crew.  His  maiden  speech  as  War  Minister 
in  the  House  of  Lords  informed  the  country,  bluntly, 
that  he  expected  a  three  years'  struggle.  During  the 
winter  an  anecdote  ascribed  to  the  taciturn  War  Sec- 
retary's loquacious  sister  gained  currency,  and  passed 
from  mouth  to  mouth.  "When  is  the  war  going  to 
end  ?"  she  asked  him.  "I  don't  know  when  it's  going 
to  end,"  he  was  said  to  have  replied,  "but  it  is  going 
to  begin  in  May."  It  was  in  May,  by  the  pitiless  irony 
of  Fate,  that  the  War  Office's  muddle  of  the  ammuni- 
tion supply  was  exposed. 

Like  all  else  in  Britain — men,  measures  and  institu- 
tions— the  arbitrament  of  time  will  be  required  to  pass 
final  judgment  on  Kitchener's  part  in  the  war.  In  the 
principal  field  he  was  called  upon  to  plow — the  raising 
of  a  huge  army  from  out  of  the  earth — he  accomplished 
marvels.  No  nation  within  fourteen  months  evolved 
from  practically  nothing  an  organization  of,  roundly, 
three  million  soldiers.  It  is  not  enough,  for  the 
actual  requirements  of  the  war  call  insistently  for 
more  and  more,  yet  "K.'s"  recruiting  achievement 
stands  forth  without  parallel  in  military  history. 
It  is  certainly  without  precedent  of  even  approxi- 
mate magnitude  in  the  annals  of  a  non-conscript 
democracy.  Lord  Kitchener's  accomplishments  in 
other  directions  have  notoriously  not  kept  pace  with 
his   successes   as   a   recruiting-sergeant.     The   shells 


Kitchener. 


THE    HELMSMEN  243 

affair  can  hardly  fail  to  dim  his  reputation.  The 
deficiencies  of  the  voluntary  system  can  not  be  called 
a  failure  directly  chargeable  to  him,  in  that  it  has 
not  brought  forward  men  in  quantity  commensu- 
rate with  the  developed  necessities  of  the  campaign. 
Kitchener  has  hinted,  but  only  that,  that  he  is  prepared 
to  resort  to  Conscription  the  moment  he  is  convinced 
that  Voluntaryism  has  collapsed.  But  it  does  not  seem 
unlikely  that  history  may  condemn  him  for  clinging 
to  the  voluntary  principle  too  long  and  hesitating  to 
make  Englishmen  do  their  duty,  instead  of  relying 
endlessly  on  their  casual  inclination  to  perform  it. 
Kitchener  has  ruled  the  British  War  Office  practically 
as  an  autocrat.  He  brooked  no  interference,  even 
from  the  Cabinet.  Viewed  from  that  standpoint,  "K." 
can  hardly  be  absolved  from  cardinal  responsibility  for 
British  military  failures.  Before  the  end  of  1915  Gen- 
eral Sir  Ian  Hamilton  had  disappeared  from  Gallipoli, 
Sir  John  French  returned  from  France,  General  Town- 
shend  retreated  from  Baghdad,  and  the  Allied  "Re- 
lief" Expedition  to  Serbia  had  retired  to  Salonica, 
whence  it  had  set  out  less  than  ten  weeks  previous. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

THE   GENERAL,   THE   ADMIRAL  AND   THE    KING 

THAT  Sir  John  French,  Commander-in-Chief  of 
the  British  forces  in  France  and  Flanders,  an 
army  which  reduces  to  comparative  insignificance  the 
largest  host  ever  marshaled  by  Napoleon,  comes  from 
fighting  stock  is  plain  enough  from  the  fact  that  his 
only  sister,  Mrs.  Despard,  is  a  militant  suffragette. 
She  herself  provides  homely  evidence  that  the  ap- 
pointment of  her  brother  (whom  she  practically 
"brought  up")  to  lead  the  British  fight  against  the 
Germans  on  land  realized  a  boyhood  aspiration.  "When 
we  were  children,"  Mrs.  Despard  relates,  "the  great 
province  of  Schleswig-Holstein  was  taken  from  Den- 
mark by  what  was  then  Prussia.  We  were  discussing 
the  disgraceful  incident  of  poor  little  Denmark  losing 
the  province,  and  a  certain  little  boy,  then  ten  or  twelve 
years  of  age,  strutted  about  and  said :  'If  I  was  only 
a  man,  I  know  what  I'd  do  to  them.'  He  was  very  in- 
dignant. That  little  boy  is  now  commander  of  Brit- 
ain's great  army." 

It  has  been  said  that  South  Africa  is  the  grave  of 
British  military  reputations.  Sir  Redvers  Buller's  was 
buried  there,  and  though  those  of  Roberts  and  Kitch- 
ener emerged  from  the  Boer  War,  the  renown  of  Botha 
and  Dewet  admittedly  outshone  them.  One  British 
General  at  least  was  "made"  by  the  three  years'  con- 

244 


THE  GENERAL,  ADMIRAL  AND  KING   245 

flict  with  the  Dutch  Republics — Sir  John  French,  the 
cavalryman  who  relieved  Kimberley,  and  whose  es- 
cutcheon during  the  sorry  South  African  campaign 
was  alone  untarnished  by  blunder  or  reverse.  As  Kitch- 
ener was  the  logical  choice  for  organizer  of  Britain's 
new  armies,  Sir  John  French  was  the  natural  selection 
for  their  field-commandership.  French,  following  in 
paternal  footsteps,  began  his  fighting  career  in  the 
navy,  but  he  has  been  a  soldier  for  the  past  forty-one 
years — he  was  sixty-three  in  September,  1915.  A  man 
whose  entire  manhood  has  been  lived  in  the  army,  who 
knows  it  through  and  through,  loves  it  passionately, 
has  devoted  himself  to  it  with  the  zeal  of  a  student, 
and  fought  in  all  its  campaigns  for  nearly  half  a  cen- 
tury, had  an  ideal  claim  upon  its  supreme  honor  in 
the  hour  of  superlative  crisis.  Doubtless  in  the  Gov- 
ernment's mind  when  it  entrusted  "Jack"  French  with 
the  command  of  the  British  Expeditionary  Force  was 
the  reputation  he  had  won  in  South  Africa  as  a  fight- 
ing field-general.  Unquestionably  the  broad  sweeping 
movements  his  cavalry  divisions  executed  at  Elands- 
laagte,  Lombard's  Kop,  Bloemfontein,  Pretoria  and 
Barberton  were  operations  which  contributed,  perhaps, 
more  than  any  other  scheme  of  the  brilliantly  misman- 
aged Boer  campaign  finally  to  bring  it  to  a  victorious 
end.  Neither  the  British  nor  the  German  General  Staff 
realized  in  August,  1914,  that  Armageddon  was  going 
to  develop  into  a  trench  or  "positional"  war,  with  lit- 
tle or  no  latitude  for  those  grandiose  tactical  maneuvers 
which  delighted  the  heart  of  Moltke  and  made  a  Sedan 
the  ambition  of  every  modern  tactician.  Yet  Sir  John 
French,  whose  military  virtues  include  adaptability,  if 
not  imaginativeness,  which  is  oftener  born,  than  ac- 


246  THE   ASSAULT 

quired,  turned  out  to  be  ideally  fitted  for  "spade  war- 
fare," in  which  the  qualities  of  endurance,  steadfast- 
ness and  patience  have  displaced  the  more  spectacular 
talents  of  daring  and  recklessness  and  those  bold 
strokes  of  magnificent  vastness  known  as  Napoleonic. 
Bonaparte's  scintillating  genius,  his  predilection  for 
the  stupendous,  would  probably  have  counted  for  little 
amid  such  immobile  conditions  as  the  Allied  armies 
have  had  to  face  in  the  West,  just  as  the  Germans' 
prized  Moltke  traditions  in  the  same  region  have  come 
to  naught. 

Military  history  will  unquestionably  accord  the 
retreat  of  the  British  army  from  Mons  a  place  among 
the  finest  achievements  of  all  times.  It  was  due  to  Sir 
John  French's  strategy  that  Berlin  was  cheated  of 
that  fiendishly  coveted  orgy  of  gloating  over  the 
"annihilation"  of  what  the  Kaiser  is  said  to  have  called 
"the  contemptible  little  British  army."  Since  Mons  and 
the  Marne  the  British  Field-Marshal's  task  has  been 
to  "hold"  the  enemy  and  to  inspire  his  men  to  fulfil, 
unflinchingly,  that  prodigious,  but  comparatively  in- 
glorious, task.  In  the  circumstances  it  was  fortunate 
that  a  man  of  Sir  John  French's  temperament  was  in 
charge.  He  knew  how  to  "sit  tight."  Kinship  with 
his  soldiers  has  been  his  lifetime  specialty.  He  is  fond 
of  sharing  their  joys  and  sorrows  not  in  any  stereo- 
typed, dress-parade  sense,  but  actually.  He  likes  to 
move  among  them,  and  does  so.  His  jaunty  fighting 
bearing  and  unfailing  good  humor  are  a  constant  in- 
spiration. Short  and  stocky,  straight  and  energetic 
of  movement,  he  looks  every  inch  a  soldier,  and  he  has 
a  soldier's  habit  of  saying  what  he  means,  direct  from 


Copyright,  Underwood  and  Underwood. 

Sir  John  French. 


THE  GENERAL,  ADMIRAL  AND  KING   247. 

the  shoulder,  whether  it  is  a  corporal,  a  staff  officer, 
a  brigadier  or  a  Cabinet  Minister  to  whom  he  is  ad- 
dressing himself. 

The  Allied  military  arrangement  conferred  supreme 
authority  on  General  Joffre,  but  the  British  Field  Mar- 
shal's character  and  career  were  considered  a  joint  guar- 
antee that  Sir  John  French  would  not  be  found  lacking 
when  called  upon  to  do  and  dare  greatly  on  his  own 
account.  It  would  be  going  too  far  to  say  that  the  war 
has  covered  French  with  glory.  He  would  be  the  first 
to  banish  such  a  thought.  Though  Britons  have  fallen 
laurel-crowned  on  a  score  of  fields  in  France  and  Flan- 
ders and  irrigated  the  cock-pit  which  lies  between  the 
Alps  and  the  Channel  with  as  heroic  blood  as  was  ever 
spilled,  the  British  offensives  in  the  West  have  been 
little  more  than  brilliant  failures.  Neuve  Chapelle  is 
an  undying  story  of  Anglo-Saxon  gallantry,  as  was 
Ypres  before  it;  but  it  was  nothing  else.  The  "big 
push"  which  England  hoped  had  at  last  begun  with  the 
fighting  in  Artois  and  the  Champagne  at  the  end  of 
September,  1915,  turned  out  to  be  a  victory  of  dis- 
tressingly short  life  and  little  real  effectiveness.  Yet 
when  German)'  lost  the  war — when  she  failed  to  take 
Paris — the  British  army  under  Sir  John  French  wrote 
history  of  which  Englishmen  will  never  be  ashamed. 
Who  it  was  that  most  effectually  parried  von  Kluck 
and  the  Crown  Prince's  thrust  at  the  French 
capital  will  probably,  among  generations  of  school- 
boys yet  unborn,  be  as  fruitful  a  theme  of  argument 
as  is  the  question  who  won  Waterloo — Wellington  or 
Bliicher — but  whatever  the  verdict  of  posterity  the 
smashing  of  the  Germans  on  the  Marne  reeked  glory 


248  THE   ASSAULT 

for  all  concerned,  and  Britain's  share  of  it  is  a  heri- 
tage which  will  survive  with  Blenheim,  Balaclava, 
Kandahar  and  Khartoum.* 

Another  Sir  John — Admiral  Jellicoe — is  comman- 
der-in-chief of  the  British  navy.  Events  still  to  come 
must  determine  whether  Anglo-Saxon  history  is  to  be 
enriched  with  another  Nelson.  But  as  far  as  human 
prescience  could  foretell,  "Jad*"  Jellicoe  was  of  all 
men  in  the  British  Fleet  preordained  by  talent,  tem- 
perament and  training  to  be  the  admiral  in  whose  keep- 
ing could  safely  be  entrusted  British  destinies  more 
priceless  than  those  which  were  safeguarded  at  Tra- 
falgar. 

Jellicoe  was  one  of  the  godfathers  of  the  dread- 
nought, having  been  summoned  by  Lord  Fisher,  the 
real  author  of  that  revolution  in  naval  science,  to  sup- 
port and  carry  into  execution  the  all-big-gun  ship  idea. 
Fisher  had  years  before  associated  young  Captain  Jel- 
licoe with  him  as  assistant  director  of  naval  ordnance, 
whereupon  there  ensued  an  intimacy  which  friends  say 
will  link  their  names  together  much  as  history  asso- 
ciated St.  Vincent  and  Nelson  as  the  twin  victors  of 
Trafalgar — the  one,  the  far-sighted  planner  of  prepar- 
atory reforms;  the  other,  the  faithful  executor  of  their 
purpose. 

Jellicoe  resembles  Sir  John  French  in  more  than 
given  name.  Like  him,  he  is  of  quite  markedly  small 
stature.  Neither  the  Generalissimo  or  Admiralissimo 
of  Britain  in  the  Great  War  at  all  corresponds,  physi- 


*  Sir  John  French  returned  to  England  in  December,  1915, 
relinquishing  (at  his  own  request,  it  was  officially  stated)  the 
commandership-in-chief  in  France  for  the  command  of  the  Home 
Defense  forces.  King  George  conferred  the  dignity  of  a  Vis- 
county on  the  Field-Marshal. 


THE  GENERAL,  ADMIRAL  AND  KING   249 

cally,  to  the  popular  notion  that  the  English  are 
"big"  men.  Like  French,  again,  Jellicoe  is  mild  and 
gentle,  a  pair  of  conspicuously  tight  lips  indicating 
poise,  reserve  force  and  self-confidence.  The  chieftain 
of  the  Grand  Fleet — that  is  its  official  title  and  not  an 
effusive  expletive — did  not  make  his  first  acquaintance 
with  danger  afloat  when  von  Tirpitz'  submarines  be- 
gan to  make  life  a  burden  for  British  sailors.  He  has 
been  snatched  from  the  jaws  of  death  on  three  sep- 
arate occasions.  In  1893  Jellicoe  was  commander  of 
Sir  George  Tryon's  Victoria,  when  it  was  sent  to  its 
doom  in  the  Mediterranean,  and,  although  "below"  in 
the  ship-hospital  with  fever  at  the  moment  of  the  dis- 
aster, was  miraculously  rescued  by  a  midshipman  when 
he  came  to  the  surface  more  dead  than  alive  after  the 
vessel  foundered.  Seven  years  previous,  as  if  Fate 
was  keeping  a  protecting  hand  over  him  for  some 
great  hour,  Jellicoe  had  an  equally  marvelous  escape 
from  drowning  when  a  gig  he  was  commanding  off 
Gibraltar  capsized  and  he  was  washed  ashore.  In  the 
Boxer  war  of  1900,  Jellicoe  was  flag  captain  to  Admi- 
ral Seymour,  the  commander  of  the  Allied  expedition 
which  marched  from  Tien-tsin  to  the  relief  of  the 
Powers'  legations  in  Pekin,  and  at  the  battle  of  Peit- 
sang  Jellicoe  was  struck  by  a  Chinese  bullet,  incurring 
wounds  which  the  flagship-surgeon  considered  fatal. 
Again  Jellicoe  was  spared.  A  brother-officer  tells  a 
story  of  Jellicoe's  agony  on  that  occasion,  which  il- 
luminates his  capacity  for  facing  the  music,  however 
doleful.  He  had  asked  how  the  advance  to  Pekin  was 
proceeding.  Told  that  everything  was  going  satisfac- 
torily, Jellicoe  flashed  back :  "Tell  me  the  truth,  damn 
it.    Don't  lie!" 


250  THE  ASSAULT 

The  triumvirate  which  has  accomplished  that  amaz- 
ing, silent  victory  of  the  British  Fleet  in  the  war — 
the  complete  conquest  of  sea  power  without  anything 
savoring  of  a  decisive  action  in  the  open— consists  of 
Lord  Fisher,  the  creator  of  the  dreadnought;  Admiral 
Sir  Percy  Scott,  the  inventor  of  the  central  "fire  con- 
trol" system,  and  Sir  John  Jellicoe,  to  whose  gunnery 
science  and  innovations  in  that  all-important  branch  of 
naval  warfare  are  ascribed,  in  large  measure,  the  ac- 
knowledged preeminence  of  the  British  Fleet  as  a 
striking  force.  He  had  not  been  director  of  ordnance 
a  year  when  the  percentage  of  the  navy's  hits  out  of 
rounds  fired  increased  from  forty-two  to  more  than 
seventy.  "In  other  words,"  as  a  critic  describes  it, 
"Jellicoe  enhanced  by  more  than  a  third  the  fighting 
value  of  the  British  Fleet,  and  that  without  a  keel  being 
added  to  its  composition." 

Jellicoe,  who  is  fifty-six  years  old,  has  nothing  but 
sailor  blood  in  his  veins.  His  father  was  a  captain  in 
the  Fleet  before  him,  and  one  of  his  kinsmen,  Admiral 
Philip  Patton,  was  Second  Sea  Lord  in  Nelson's  time. 
Jellicoe  is  the  incarnation  of  the  spirit,  traditions,  prac- 
tises and  brain- force  of  the  British  navy  of  to-day. 
He  has  the  not  inconsiderable  advantage  of  having  had 
opportunity  personally  to  take  the  measure  of  his  Ger- 
man antagonists,  for  he  has  visited  their  country,  where 
he  made  the  acquaintance  of  von  Tirpitz,  Ingenohl, 
Pohl,  Behncke,  Holtzendorff,  Prince  Henry  and  all  the 
other  naval  men  of  the  Fatherland,  and  was  even  priv- 
ileged to  cruise  over  Berlin  in  a  Zeppelin. 

England  has  heard  little  and  seen  nothing  of  Jelli- 
coe during  the  war.  The  veil  of  mystery  which  en- 
velops the  Grand  Fleet  is  seldom  lifted.    Not  one  Eng- 


[THE  GENERAL,  ADMIRAL  AND  KING  251 

lishman  in  a  million  knows  where  the  Fleet  is,  though 
all  know  that  it  is  where  it  ought  to  be.  A  ten  days' 
visit  paid  to  the  officers  and  men  of  the  Armada  by  the 
Archbishop  of  York  in  the  late  summer  of  1915  re- 
sulted in  imparting  to  the  nation  the  first  glimmer  of 
their  life,  of  their  indomitable  watch  and  wait,  which 
had  been  forthcoming. 

"It  is  difficult  for  our  sailormen,"  wrote  the  Arch- 
bishop, "to  realize  the  value  of  their  long-drawn  vigil. 
Their  one  longing  is  to  meet  the  German  ships  and  sink 
them;  and  yet  month  after  month  the  German  ships 
decline  the  challenge.  The  men  have  little  time  or 
chance  or  perhaps  inclination  to  read  accounts  in 
serious  journals  of  the  invaluable  service  which  the 
Navy  is  fulfilling  by  simply  keeping  its  watch;  and 
naval  officers  do  not  make  speeches  to  their  men.  I 
think,  indeed  I  know,  that  it  was  a  real  encouragement 
to  them  to  hear  a  voice  from  the  land  of  their  homes 
telling  them  of  the  debt  their  country  owes  them  for 
the  command  of  the  seas — the  safety  of  the  ships  car- 
rying food  and  means  of  work  to  the  people,  supplies 
of  men  and  munitions  to  the  fields  of  battle — which 
is  secured  to  us  by  the  patient  watching  of  the  Fleet." 
Speaking  of  Admiral  Jellicoe,  the  Archbishop  said : 
"It  was  refreshing  and  exhilarating  beyond  words 
to  find  oneself  in  a  world  governed  by  a  great  tradi- 
tion so  strong  that  it  has  become  an  instinct  of  unity 
and  mutual  trust.  But  to  the  influence  of  this  great 
tradition  must  be  added  the  influence  of  a  great  per- 
sonality. I  can  not  refrain  from  saying  here  that  I 
left  the  Grand  Fleet  sharing  to  the  full  the  admira- 
tion, affection,  and  confidence  which  every  officer  and 


252  THE  ASSAULT 

man  within  it  feels  for  its  Commander-in-Chief,  Sir 
John  Jellicoe.  He  reassuredly  is  the  right  man  in  the 
right  place  at  the  right  time.  His  officers  give  him 
the  most  absolute  trust  and  loyalty.  When  I  spoke  of 
him  to  his  men  I  always  felt  that  quick  response  which 
to  a  speaker  is  the  sure  sign  that  he  has  reached  and 
touched  the  hearts  of  his  hearers.  The  Commander- 
in-Chief — quiet,  modest,  courteous,  alert,  resolute, 
holding  in  firm  control  every  part  of  his  great  fighting 
engine — has  under  his  command  not  only  the  ships  but 
the  heart  of  his  Fleet.  He  embodies  and  strengthens 
that  comradeship  of  single-minded  service  which  is 
the  crowning  honor  of  the  Navy." 

More  than  once  the  criticism  has  been  uttered  in 
England  itself  that  the  Fleet  has  been  conspicuously 
lacking  in  the  "Nelson  touch."  Even  Americans, 
friendy  observers,  have  ventured  to  suggest  that 
there  seemed  to  be  an  absence  of  the  Farragut  or 
Dewey  "to-hell-with-mines"  spirit.  Up  to  the  end  of 
the  first  year  of  war,  Britons  faced  the  fact  that  their 
"supreme  navy"  had  lost  seven  battleships  aggregating 
97,600  tons  (not  counting  a  super-dreadnought  re- 
ported by  the  foreign  press  to  have  been  lost  in  the 
early  months  of  the  war,  but  which  was  a  loss  never 
"officially  confirmed"  in  England),  and  ten  cruisers 
aggregating  81,365  tons.  Submarines,  in  that  nerve- 
racking  and  troublous  day  before  Scott  and  Jellicoe 
solved  the  problem  of  sinking  "U  boats"  almost  faster 
than  German  dockyards  could  launch  substitutes,  ac- 
complished terrific  havoc  among  the  British  merchant 
fleet,  even  though  the  sea  commerce  of  these  islands 
was  never  remotely  in  danger  of  being  "paralyzed," 


Copyright,  Underwood  and  Underwood. 
Sir  J.  R,  Jcllicoe. 


JHE  GENERAL,  ADMIRAL  AND  KING  253 

as  von  Tirpitz  and  the  minions  of  Frightfulness  fondly 
planned. 

Yet  all  this  while,  the  British  Fleet  was  tightening  its 
grip  upon  the  command  of  the  sea  to  an  extent  which 
may  now  be  described  as  absolute.  The  German  flag, 
war  ensign  and  merchant  pennant,  has  been  swept  from 
the  oceans  as  if  it  had  never  flown.  Hamburg  and 
Bremen,  the  Fatherland's  prides,  are  as  completely  de- 
molished, as  far  as  their  usefulness  to  Germany  for 
war  is  concerned,  as  if  they  had  been  battered  into 
smoking  ruins.  German  mercantile  trade  simply  no 
longer  exists,  except  such  of  it  as  can  be  smuggled 
in  tramps  and  ferries  across  the  narrow  reach  of  the 
Baltic  between  Pomerania  and  the  Scandinavian  ports. 
The  Germanic  Allies  can  import  and  export  nothing 
oversea  except  by  the  grace  of  Jellicoe.  Their  de- 
ported propaganda  chieftains  or  compromised  ambas- 
sadors and  attaches  can  not  return  to  their  homes  in 
Europe  from  the  United  States  without  gracious  "safe 
conduct"  by  the  British  Fleet.  The  toymakers  of 
Nuremberg  can  not  deliver  a  solitary  tin  soldier  to  an 
American  Christmas  tree  unless  Jellicoe  says  yes.  Two 
score  proud  German  liners,  including  the  queen  of 
them  all,  the  Vaterland,  are  rotting  and  rusting  in 
United  States  harbors,  ingloriously  imprisoned  by 
British  naval  power.  In  a  dozen  other  ports  through- 
out the  world  Hamburg  and  Bremen  vessels  tug  at 
anchor — greyhounds  enchained.  Germany  is  banned 
from  the  oceans  like  an  outlaw.  Her  people  can  eat 
and  drink  only  on  the  ration  basis.  The  British  Fleet 
has  done  something  else  of  which,  it  seemed  to  me,  an 
American  Presidential  message  might  legitimately  have 
made  mention.  It  has  enabled  the  people  of  the  United 


254  THE   ASSAULT 

States  for  many  months  to  traverse  the  oceans  in 
security. 

These  are  the  immediate  effects  of  British  sea  su- 
premacy on  the  enemy,  but  even  they  are  incommen- 
surate with  the  advantages  which  accrue  to  Britain 
herself.  A  navy  has  three  cardinal  functions :  to  pre- 
serve its  own  shores  from  invasion;  to  maintain  in- 
violate its  country's  oversea  communications,  including 
cables,  food  supply,  passenger  traffic  and  postal  trans- 
portation ;  and,  finally,  to  destroy  the  sea  forces  of  the 
enemy.  The  first  two  of  these  functions  have  been 
fulfilled  by  the  Grand  Fleet,  and  at  a  cost  in  men  and 
material,  though  not  inconsiderable,  which  is  infinitesi- 
mal, measured  by  the  results  attained.  To  absolve 
the  third,  and,  of  course,  climacteric,  function,  Jellicoe 
and  his  men  and  his  ironclads  stand  ready  wfyen  the 
opportunity  is  given  them — readier,  by  far,  than  when 
the  war  began.  They  have  not  lost  a  really  vital  fight- 
ing unit  (supposing  unconfirmed  reports  to  the  con- 
trary to  be  unfounded).  They  have  had  a  priceless 
experience  of  sea  warfare  under  almost  every  con- 
ceivable condition.  They  are  veterans  of  every  essen- 
tial contingency.  There  is  hardly  a  terror,  military  or 
atmospheric,  which  they  have  not  faced  and  sur- 
mounted. They  have  added  to  their  battle  efficiency 
by  a  great  many  new  and  powerful  ships.  Their 
morale  is  unbroken. 

When  the  Kaiser's  Canal  Armada  finally  makes  up 
its  mind,  as  I  believe  that  German  public  opinion  will 
some  day  compel  it  to,  to  forsake  the  snug  harbors  of 
Kiel  and  Wilhelmshaven  and  the  screen  of  Heligoland 
for  the  high  sea,  it  will  find  that  Jellicoe  has  up  his 
iron  sleeve  a  welcome,  as  to  the  issue  of  which  no  one 


[THE  GENERAL,  ADMIRAL  AND  KING  255 

in  these  islands  is  capable  of  cherishing  the  remotest 
doubt.  History  is  barren  of  an  instance  of  a  Power 
defeated  in  war,  who  retained  command  of  the  sea. 
Were  there  no  other  considerations  which  spell  the 
eventual,  though  probably  not  the  early,  frustration 
of  Germany's  ambition  to  master  Europe  and,  as 
William  II  once  sighed,  to  snatch  the  trident  from 
Britannia's  grasp,  the  vise-like  grip  of  naval  power 
which  Jellicoe  has  wrested  alone  denotes  that  Arma- 
geddon can  have  but  one  ending,  however  long  it  be 
deferred. 

In  this  cursory  review  of  the  men  at  Britain's  helm, 
the  Sovereign  is  deliberately  put  at  the  end  instead  of 
the  beginning.  I  mean  to  cast  no  impious  slur  upon 
George  V  in  thus  classifying  his  relative  importance 
in  the  scheme  of  British  war  life,  yet  to  rank  him  at 
the  front  of  the  captains  of  the  State  would  be  hyper- 
bole as  unpardonable  in  a  chronicler  as  gratuitous 
defamation  would  be. 

To  discuss  the  figure  cut  by  England's  King  during 
the  past  year  is  a  task  which  a  foreigner  approaches 
with  diffidence.  I  should  not  dream  of  taking  such 
liberties  with  their  Britannic  Majesties,  for  example, 
as  my  gifted  friend  and  colleague,  Irvin  Shrewsbury 
Cobb,  who  recently  diagnosed  the  Royal  situation  in 
England  thus :  "I  have  seen  the  King  and  Queen,  and 
I  know  now  why  they  call  him  George  the  Fifth; 
Mary's  the  other  four-fifths."  Whether  this  subtle 
tribute  to  the  undoubtedly  potent  influence  of  the 
gracious  Queen  explains  it  or  not,  the  indisputable  fact 
remains  that  the  part  played  by  King  George  in  the 
day  of  supreme  British  national  trial  has  been  a  keen 
disappointment  to  a  great  many  of  his  subjects.    It  is 


256  THE  ASSAULT 

not  a  topic  which  they  discuss  at  all  in  public,  nor  one 
upon  which  it  is  easy  to  extract  their  views  even  in 
private.  But  when  an  inquiring  alien  even  of  unmis- 
takably sympathetic  sentiment  accomplishes  the  mira- 
cle of  inducing  a  Briton  to  pour  out  his  heart,  he  will 
secure  evidence  corroborative  of  an  impression  the 
foreigner  has  had  from  the  start,  if  he  has  lived  in 
England  since  August,  1914 — that  the  monarchy,  as 
such,  has  not  given  a  wholly  satisfactory  account  of 
itself.  Men  who  are  so  utterly  un-English  as  to  be 
"quite"  frank  even  suggest  that  King  George's  insist- 
ence not  only  upon  enacting  the  "constitutional  mon- 
arch," but  overplaying  that  role,  has  not  inconsiderably 
undermined  the  solidity  of  the  Royal  principle  in 
numerous  British  hearts.  They  will  tell  you,  if  in 
communicative  mood,  that  George  has  failed  to  rise 
to  the  majestic  opportunities  of  the  moment.  They 
contrast  his  incorrigibly  "constitutional"  behavior  with 
what  they  feel  assured  is  the  red-blooded  lead  King 
Edward  would  have  given.  They  assert  that  the  hour 
of  Imperial  peril,  when  national  existence  itself  is  at 
stake,  has  caused  so  many  cherished  shibboleths  to  go 
by  the  board,  that  the  strait-jacket  of  "constitutional 
monarchy,"  which  is  another  name  for  Irresponsibility, 
ought  to  go  with  them.  In  times  of  peace,  say  English- 
men, a  conscientious  figurehead  on  the  throne  is  good 
enough.  In  times  of  war,  they  want  a  King.  He  need 
not  be  the  blatant,  ubiquitous  limelight-chaser  that  the 
Kaiser  is,  but  some  of  that  royal  dynamo's  attributes, 
diluted  with  English  seasoning,  would  not  have  been 
unwelcome  to  his  people  during  the  past  year  and  a 
half.    Britons,  though,  I  repeat,  they  do  not  cry  it  out 


JHE  GENERAL,  ADMIRAL  AND  KING   257, 

for  the  multitude  to  hear,  are  not  edified  by  the  spec- 
tacle of  a  sovereign  who  has  sojourned  with  his  army 
and  fleet  only  in  the  most  formal  manner,  whose  war- 
time activities  are  confined  to  peripatetic  visits  to  hos- 
pitals and  convalescent  homes,  to  inspections  and 
reviews,  and  to  distribution  of  Victoria  Crosses  and 
Distinguished  Service  medals  at  Buckingham  Palace. 

"The  King,"  to  whom  Englishmen,  before  10  p.  m., 
still  drink  in  reverential  sincerity,  and  who  rise  in  de- 
vout respect  when  they  hear  the  anthem  which  be- 
seeches Divine  salvation  for  him,  is  an  institution  from 
which  Britain  felt  it  had  a  right  to  expect  both  lead  and 
deed  in  a  great  war.  She  did  not  demand,  or  at  least 
no  conspicuous  section  of  her  has,  that  the  King  should 
take  the  field  or  the  sea,  and  prance  about  in  the  saddle 
or  on  the  quarter-deck,  but  they  did  hope,  I  think,  for 
something  more  inspiring  than  nebulous  constitutional- 
ism. It  was  many  months  after  thousands  of  other 
British  mothers  had  sent  their  sons  to  death  and  glory 
that  Queen  Mary  consented  to  the  dispatch  of  the 
twenty-one-year-old  Prince  of  Wales  to  the  trenches. 
And  Prince  Albert,  who  is  twenty,  and  was  in  the 
navy  before  the  war,  was  never,  as  far  as  the  public 
is  informed,  able  to  gratify  his  desire  to  return  to 
active  service  afloat,  but  must  cool  his  martial  ardor 
in  the  inglorious  capacity  of  an  Admiralty  messenger 
in  London.  Britons  look  across  to  Germany,  Russia 
and  Italy,  even  to  Belgium  and  Serbia,  and,  contrasting 
the  spectacle  with  "constitutionalism"  in  their  own 
Royal  household,  acknowledge  that  theirs  is  not  a 
thrilling  picture. 

If  you  attempt  to  penetrate  into  what  may  strike 


258  THE   ASSAULT 

you  as  a  mystery,  you  will  be  told  that  the  cause  as 
far  as  King  George  is  concerned,  is  twofold:  first, 
his  high-minded,  even  slavish,  devotion  to  his  concep- 
tion of  his  constitutional  limitations,  and,  secondly, 
his  equally  incorrigible  shyness.  Sarah  Bernhardt, 
when  King  George  and  Queen  Mary  were  in  Paris 
a  couple  of  years  ago,  was  once  summoned  to  the 
royal  box  of  the  Comedie  Franchise  for  presenta- 
tion to  the  British  sovereigns.  She  explained  to 
friends  afterward  that  the  King's  modesty  positively 
unnerved  her.  He  was  as  bashful  as  a  schoolgirl.  I 
have  been  told  that  his  manner  in  the  presence  even  of 
his  Ministers  is  almost  deferential.  He  does  not  know 
the  meaning  of  "mixing,"  an  art  in  which  his  late 
father  excelled.  "The  King  and  Queen  are  fond  of 
lunching  alone,  and  usually  take  their  tea  together,"  I 
read  the  other  day  in  a  "well-informed"  society  paper. 
Edward  VII  was  fond  of  lunching  with  men  of  affairs. 
He  did  not  heed  the  hoots  of  the  aristocratic  set,  which 
was  scandalized  by  his  intimacy  with  tea-merchants 
and  money  kings,  because  through  them  he  was  accus- 
tomed to  keep  in  touch  with  the  human  currents  of  his 
people's  life  and  times.  Edward  would  hardly  have  al- 
lowed even  the  Empire's  greatest  soldier  (Englishmen 
explain)  to  call  the  new  army  "Kitchener's  Army." 
It  would  have  been  called  the  "King's  Army"  and  the 
King  would  have  thrown  his  incalculably  great  moral 
influence  into  the  breach  in  some  more  practical  way 
than  lending  his  photograph  for  recruiting  advertise- 
ments. George  V  could  have  been  England's  finest 
recruiting  sergeant.  He  preferred  to  remain  a  consti- 
tutional monarch. 


Copyright,  Underwood  and  Underwood. 

King  George  V, 


THE  GENERAL,  ADMIRAL  AND  KING   259 

Englishmen  excuse,  rather  than  blame,  the  King. 
They  point  out,  in  his  extenuation,  that  George's  is  a 
gentle,  self-effacing  nature  little  fitted  for  the  soul-stir- 
ring era  in  the  midst  of  which  Fate  decreed  that  his 
reign  should  fall.  They  cast  no  aspersions  on  his 
rugged  patriotism  or  even  on  his  kingly  zeal.  They 
believe  that,  according  to  his  lights,  he  exercises  faith- 
fully what  he  considers  to  be  his  prerogatives.  They 
feel,  they  tell  you,  that  it  is  not  his  fault  that  he  re- 
mains the  only  man  in  the  Kingdom  who  still  wears  a 
Prince  Albert  coat.  His  is,  somehow,  not  the  mag- 
netic influence  which,  if  it  were  that  of  Edward  VII, 
would  still  be  condemning  Englishmen  to  cling  to  that 
ancient  robe.  They  explain  that  it  is  his  psychic  mis- 
fortune, rather  than  a  failing,  that  nobody  thinks  it 
worth  while  to  emulate  him  by  taking  the  pledge  "for 
the  duration  of  the  war"  and  drinking  barley-water. 
Edward  VIFs  abstemious  decree  would  have  blotted 
the  liquor  trade  out  of  existence,  because  in  the  lap  of 
his  example  sat  militant  loyalty.  The  "old  King's" 
wish  was  law. 

Perhaps — I  do  not  know — George  V  is  wiser  than 
men  think.  Perhaps  he  is  not  being  kept  in  cotton- 
wool by  his  Victorian  private  secretary.  Perhaps  he 
is  not  yielding  as  supinely  as  many  people  imagine  to 
the  inflexible  mandates  of  constitutionalism.  Perhaps 
he  has  his  ear  closer  to  the  ground  than  his  contem- 
poraries realize,  and  with  it  hears  the  far-off  but  un- 
mistakable rumbles  of  the  limitlessly  democratized 
Britain  which  is  already  emerging  from  the  crucible  of 
war.  Perhaps  injustice  is  done  to  him  by  those  who 
accuse  him  of  not  rising  more  vigorously  to  the  oppor- 


260  THE   ASSAULT 

tunities  of  his  Empire's  hour  of  destiny.  May  he  not 
be  fitting  himself  still  to  sit  the  throne  in  that  coming 
day  when  Britain  will  perhaps  want  even  a  more  con- 
stitutional ruler  than  ermine  and  the  crown  now  rest 
upon? 


(CHAPTER  XVII 

"YOUR  KING  AND  COUNTRY  WANT  YOU" 

"TUNA  PARK,"  in  Berlin,  once  had  an  English 

1  j  manager  and  an  American  "publicity  agent." 
In  pursuit  of  his  lime-light  duties  the  transatlantic 
hustler,  who  had  been  engaged  because  he  was  such, 
reported  to  the  manager  one  day  that  he  had  accom- 
plished a  feat  on  which  he  had  been  plodding  for. 
weeks.  The  owners  of  a  building  which  commanded 
the  most  prominent  view  in  Berlin  had  finally  con- 
sented to  let  "Luna  Park"  affix  a  gigantic  electric 
flash-light  sign  to  the  roof. 

"It  will  be  the  greatest  thing  of  the  kind  ever  seen 
in  Germany,"  exclaimed  the  enthusiast  from  the 
U.  S.  A.  "They'll  allow  us  to  have  'Luna  Park'  in 
letters  twenty  feet  high  across  a  one-hundred-and-fifty- 
foot  front,  and  you'll  be  able  to  see  'em  a  mile  away !" 

He  expected  his  British  superior  fairly  to  jump  for 
joy.    But  this  is  what  he  said : 

"Quite  so.  But  don't  you  think  that  will  be  a  bit 
conspicuous  ?" 

When  I  returned  to  London  on  September  24,  after 
four  short,  strenuous  weeks  in  the  United  States,  I 
found  Englishmen  dominated  seemingly  by  a  genuine 
fear  that  the  war  might  become  "a  bit  conspicuous." 
It  was  true  that  stupendous  things  had  happened  in  the 
interval.     Namur,  "the  impregnable,"  had  melted  be- 

261 


262  THE   ASSAULT 

fore  the  merciless  German  42's  like  the  other  Belgian 
fortresses.  Brussels  was  in  the  enemy's  hands,  un- 
scotched,  thanks  to  the  intervention  of  the  American 
Minister,  Brand  Whitlock,  and  through  it  were  pass- 
ing apparently  endless  streams  of  gray-clad  Germans 
bound  for  Antwerp  and  the  sea.  France  had  been 
overrun,  regardless  of  the  cost  in  Teuton  blood,  Lille 
and  the  industrial  provinces  were  securely  held,  and, 
although  the  Crown  Prince  and  von  Kluck  had  been 
gloriously  repulsed  in  their  frenzied  dash  on  Paris,  the 
capital  had  all  but  resounded  to  the  clatter  of  Uhlan 
hoofs,  and  Bordeaux  was  still  regarded  a  far  safer 
seat  of  Government.  England  herself  had  lived 
through  hours  of  anxious  crisis  blacker  than  any 
within  the  memory  of  the  living  generation.  At  Mons, 
as  official  reports  disclosed,  the  gallant  little  British 
army  narrowly  escaped  annihilation.  As  it  was,  it 
lost  hideously  in  killed  and  wounded.  Gaping  holes 
had  been  ripped  in  the  ranks  of  famous  regiments,  and 
the  Expeditionary  Force,  within  six  weeks  of  its  land- 
ing, was  already  sadly  mangled.  Sir  John  French  stirred 
the  nation  with  his  dispatch  on  the  retreat  from  Mons 
and  told  how  his  army,  though  hurriedly  concentrated 
by  rail  only  two  days  before,  had  tenaciously  with- 
stood, in  the  dogged  British  way,  the  combined  attack 
of  five  crack  German  corps.  In  the  subsequent  fight- 
ing which  beat  the  Germans  on  the  Marne  and  saved 
Paris,  British  soldiers,  battered  and  battle-scarred  as 
they  were,  had  done  even  more  than  their  share.  Two 
days  before  arrival  in  Liverpool  the  Campania  wire- 
less— I  returned  to  England  in  the  same  veteran  hulk 
which  had  taken  me  to  America  in  August — brought 
the   dread   tidings   of   the   submarining  of   cruisers 


YOUR   KING   AND   YOUR   COUNTRY    263 

Aboukir,  Cressy  and  Hogue  in  the  Channel  by  the  Up 
and  Weddigen,  with  cruelly  heavy  sacrifice  of  British 
lives. 

All  these  things  had  happened,  and  yet  London  was 
unshaken.  She  had  been  "a  bit  uneasy,"  my  English 
friends  conceded,  in  the  days  and  nights  when  the  fate 
of  Paris  and  Sir  John  French's  army  seemed  to  be  in 
doubt,  and  the  Up's  feat  had  "cost  us  three  obsolete 
boats,"  but  the  Germans  were  checked  now,  and  the 
worst  was  over.  Churchill  was  sending  a  British  na- 
val expedition  to  Belgium  to  save  Antwerp,  and  what 
was  the  use  of  worrying,  anyhow?  Kitchener's  army 
was  filling  up  with  recruits  by  the  thousand,  and  Eng- 
land's motto  was  "Business  as  Usual." 

Yea,  verily,  Britain  was  pursuing  the  even  tenor  of 
her  imperturbable  way.  The  Savoy,  at  supper  after 
theater,  glittered  with  all  its  old-time  flare.  The  tables 
were  thronged  in  the  same  old  way  with  gaily-clad 
women,  romping  chorus-girls,  monocled  "nuts"  with 
hair  plastered  straight  back,  opulent  stock-brokers, 
theatrical  celebrities  and  all  the  other  familiar  people 
about  town.  The  band  interpolated  Tipperary  a  lit- 
tle oftener  between  rag-time  one-steps  and  fox-trots, 
and  lordlings  and  other  bloods  in  khaki  gave  a  new 
tinge  to  the  picture,  but  otherwise  it  was  night-time 
London  "as  usual."  The  theaters  and  music-halls 
were  full.  At  Murray's  and  the  Four  Hundred — those 
dens  of  revelry  called  "night  clubs,"  invented  for  law- 
respecting  English  who  can  afford  five  guineas  a  year 
for  the  privilege  of  wining,  supping  and  dancing 
after  the  Acts  of  Parliament  send  ordinary  people  to 
bed — you  could  hardly  wedge  your  way  in.  At  the 
Carlton  or  the  Piccadilly,  or  for  the  matter  of  that  at 


264  THE   ASSAULT 

any  other  popular  resort  in  all  London,  you  found 
yourself  lucky  to  locate  a  single  unpreempted  place. 
Wherever  you  went  or  turned,  whomever  you  saw,  it 
was  dear  old  London  "as  usual."  If  you  were  an  im- 
pulsive, excitable,  sentimental  American  and  thought 
you  were  mildly  rebuking  your  British  friends  when 
you  ventured  to  wonder  at  the  extraordinary  natural- 
ness of  life  in  the  West  End,  or  at  Walton  Heath  golf 
links,  or  at  Chelsea  football  grounds,  or  at  the  Newmar- 
ket race-course,  you  found  yourself  unconsciously  pay- 
ing a  tribute  to  "British  character."  For  John  Bull,  far 
from  being  ashamed  of  adhering  religiously  to  peace- 
time activities,  was  positively  proud  of  the  exhibition 
of  "reserve"  and  "poise"  and  "calmness"  which  he  was 
now  giving.  People  talked  about  the  war,  of  course. 
They  hardly  mentioned  anything  else.  But  if  you  had 
the  patience  to  listen  to  their  airy,  fairy  converse,  you 
soon  gathered  that  they  spoke  of  it  exclusively  as 
something  about  which  no  self-respecting  Englishman 
or  woman  purposed  for  a  solitary  moment  to  get  in- 
decorously agitated.  There  were  even  people  who  con- 
fessed that  the  war  was  beginning  to  "bore"  them. 

As  for  myself,  I  had  a  go  at  British  acquaintances 
from  two  entirely  different  standpoints.  In  the  first 
place,  fresh  from  America,  where  the  war  had  burnt 
into  people's  minds  as  deeply  almost  as  if  it  were  their 
own  destiny  which  was  at  stake,  I  was  still  filled  with 
the  energizing  atmosphere  omnipresent  there.  I  re- 
membered how  even  our  puny  war  with  Spain  had 
gripped  the  nation's  thought  and  concentrated  it  to  the 
exclusion  of  all  else.  I  could  not,  for  the  life  of  me, 
understand  how  Englishmen,  with  the  history  of  the 
preceding  eight  weeks  before  them,  could  still  look 


YOUR  KING  AND  YOUR  COUNTRY    265 

upon  "business  as  usual"  as  the  desideratum  for  which 
the  moment  insistently  called.  I  knew,  I  thought,  how 
Americans  would  feel  and  act  at  such  an  hour ;  and  as 
I  had  in  my  time  dozed  through  many  after-dinner 
speeches  about  the  "kindred  ideals"  and  "identical 
habits  of  thought"  which  so  indissolubly  bound  the 
English-speaking  nations,  I  ventured  to  marvel,  and 
even  at  times  to  swear,  at  the  spectacle  of  national  non- 
chalance which  Britain  at  the  beginning  of  October, 
1914,  so  resolutely  presented.  It  was  magnificent,  but 
it  was  not  war. 

In  the  second  place,  I  was  conscious,  with  the  knowl- 
edge and  conviction  of  a  long-time  eye-witness,  of 
both  the  visible  and  the  dormant  strength  of  Germany. 
I  had  written  literally  reams,  during  the  preceding 
eight  years,  about  Teuton  preparations  on  land,  in  the 
air  and  on  the  sea.  I  had  discussed  the  German  War 
Party,  its  leaders  and  its  literature,  its  aspirations  and 
its  plans,  till  I  often  grew  weary  of  the  task,  not  so 
much  because  pacifist  critics  in  England  pilloried  me  as 
a  war-monger  and  an  alarmist,  but  because  there  was 
a  monotony  in  that  sort  of  news  about  Germany 
which  strained  even  the  patience  of  those  whose  duty 
it  was  to  report  it.  When  Englishmen  now  told  me,  as 
so  many  of  them  did,  that  they  would  "muddle 
through  this  show,"  as  they  had  "muddled  through"  in 
South  Africa  and  on  all  the  other  occasions  in  Britain's 
martial  past,  I  grew  sick  at  heart.  I  knew,  as  every- 
body who  had  lived  in  Germany  between  1904  and 
1914  and  kept  his  ears  and  eyes  open  knew,  that  "mud- 
dling through"  would  never  beat  the  Germans,  even  if 
it  had  finally  overcome  the  Boers.  I  knew,  and  any- 
body really  acquainted  with  the  Germans  knew,  that 


266  THE   ASSAULT 

they  would  not  be  vanquished  so  long  as  there  was  a 
man  or  a  mark  with  which  to  fight.  I  knew  that  noth- 
ing short  of  the  supreme  effort  which  the  British 
Empire  and  its  Allies  could  put  forth  would  suffice  to 
overcome  the  most  highly-organized  and  efficiently  pa- 
triotic people  which  had  ever  gone  to  war.  I  knew  that 
the  German  General  Staff  and  the  other  war-makers  of 
the  Fatherland  had  long  reckoned,  in  the  emergency  of 
a  struggle  with  England,  on  the  very  thing  of  which 
my  eyes  were  now  witness — British  reluctance  to  shake 
off  the  shackles  of  ease  and  comfort  and  buckle  down, 
a  nation  in  arms,  to  the  inconvenient  and  grim  realities 
of  war.  Of  these  things  I  thought,  and  the  reflection 
was  disquieting,  as  I  saw  the  mad  whirl  of  light,  fri- 
volity and  care-free  joy  which  the  Savoy  at  supper- 
time,  plainly  epitomizing  London  life  at  the  moment, 
presented  night  after  night.  "Business  as  usual !"  It 
was  small  comfort  my  English  friends  provided,  when, 
remonstrating  with  me  for  my  foolish  solicitude,  they 
assured  me  that  my  misgivings  were  misplaced  be- 
cause I  was  hopelessly  ignorant  of  "the  British  char- 
acter." 

England,  it  was  obvious,  was  like  the  manager  of 
"Luna  Park"  in  Berlin.  She  was  afraid  the  war  might 
become  "a  bit  conspicuous,"  and  was,  moreover,  deter- 
mined that  it  should  not.  I  remember  well  the  crushing 
rebuke  administered  to  me  by  a  Britisher  of  interna- 
tional renown  when  I  intruded  my  view  of  all  these 
things.  I  had  offered,  in  a  desire  to  hold  the  mirror 
up  to  Nature  and  let  Londoners  see  how  they  looked  to 
foreigners  at  so  transcendent  a  moment  in  their  na- 
tional existence,  to  produce  a  little  article  entitled 
"What  an  American  Thinks  of  the  English  in  War- 


YOUR  KING  AND  YOUR   COUNTRY    267 

Time."  I  even  went  to  the  length  of  putting  my 
thoughts  on  paper  and  submitting  the  manuscript.  I 
did  so  with  considerable  confidence,  because  the  celeb- 
rity in  question  is  a  notorious  "Wake  Up,  England!" 
man.  But  he  returned  my  masterpiece  with  a  look  and 
gesture  mingling  pity  and  contempt  for  my  wretched 
unfamiliarity  with  "the  British  character." 

"My  dear  Wile,"  he  explained,  "you  do  not  under- 
stand us.  You  forget  that  this  war  is  not  an  American 
World's  Championship  baseball  series.  You  mustn't 
try  to  foist  transatlantic  brass-band  methods  on  us. 
It  is  not  the  British  way." 

Lest  I  convey  the  impression  that  I  had  advocated 
rousing  the  British  lion  from  his  slumbers  by  wild  and 
woolly  western  methods  palpably  unsuited  to  his 
stoical  temperament,  let  me  make  haste  to  explain  that 
I  was  pleading  for  nothing  but  a  system  which  would, 
spectacularly  if  necessary,  do  something  to  let  the 
British  public  at  least  know  that  they  had  a  war  on 
their  hands,  and  popularize  it.  A  great  contingent  of 
Indian  troops,  led  by  Maharajahs  and  Rajputs,  Maliks, 
Rajahs  and  Jams,  had  arrived  in  Europe,  tarried  in 
England  and  been  slipped,  in  the  dead  of  a  Channel 
night,  across  to  France.  An  entire  army  from  Canada 
was  encamped  on  Salisbury  Plain,  and  no  one  had  seen 
a  sign  of  it  except  an  occasional  detachment  of  boister- 
ous subalterns,  many  with  a  pronounced  "American 
accent,"  who  had  kicked  up  a  row  in  some  Leices- 
ter Square  music-hall  the  night  before.  The  Nelson 
monument  in  Trafalgar  Square  was  desecrated  with 
recruiting  circus-bills  which  would  have  delighted  the 
heart  of  Barnum,  and  every  taxicab  wind-shield  in 
town  beseeched  passers-by  to  "enlist  for  the  duration 


268  THE   ASSAULT 

of  the  war."  But  why,  I  had  had  the  temerity  to  in- 
quire in  my  little  "Wake  Up,  England !"  homily,  which 
was  rejected  because  it  revealed  no  insight  into  "Brit- 
ish character,"  were  not  the  turbaned  Gurkhas  and  the 
swarthy  Sikhs  and  the  brown  men  from  Punjab  and 
Beluchistan  brought  to  London-town  and  paraded  up 
and  down  the  Strand  and  the  Embankment,  for  all  the 
metropolis  to  have  a  priceless  object-lesson  in  Imperial 
patriotism  ?  Why  was  Kitchener  allowed  to  intern  the 
young  giants  in  khaki  from  Ontario,  Quebec,  Alberta, 
Saskatchewan  and  British  Columbia  in  the  hidden 
recesses  of  the  provinces,  instead  of  giving  Londoners 
a  glimpse  of  Colonial  love  of  mother  country  in  the 
flesh  ?  It  was  due  to  the  Indians  and  to  the  Canadians 
themselves,  no  less  than  to  London,  I  argued,  that  op- 
portunity should  be  provided  to  pay  homage  to  the 
men  who  had  crossed  the  seas  to  fight  for  Motherland. 
Non-British  though  I  am,  I  felt  morally  certain  that 
even  my  Hoosier  bosom  would  swell  with  emotion  in 
the  presence  of  so  ocular  a  demonstration  of  Brit- 
ain's Imperial  solidarity  in  the  day  of  trial.  But  my 
suggestions  were  rejected  as  unbecomingly  boisterous 
in  their  intent,  good  enough  for  the  Polo  Grounds  or 
Madison  Square  Garden,  but  grotesquely  out  of  place 
in  England.  If  carried  out,  you  see,  they  would  inev- 
itably have  made  the  war  "a  bit  conspicuous." 

That  the  war  was  almost  invisibly  hidden,  as  far  as 
the  daily  life  of  the  people  was  concerned,  was  prima- 
rily due  to  the  bureaucratic  and  autocratic  methods  of 
the  censorship.  Bureaucracy  and  autocracy  in  Ger- 
many, for  instance,  have  their  redeeming  qualities. 
They  are  usually  highly  efficient,  and  their  arrogance 
and  high-handedness  are  tolerated  because  accompa- 


YOUR   KING   AND   YOUR   COUNTRY    269 

nied  by  a  maximum  of  practical  effectiveness.  When 
England  established  her  war  censorship,  she  went  over 
to  bureaucracy  and  autocracy,  as  made  in  Germany,  but 
lamentably  lacking  in  the  saving  graces  of  the  system 
as  there  exemplified.  In  vain  the  Press,  now  muzzled 
almost  as  effectually  as  if  the  Magna  Charta  and  free 
speech  had  never  existed,  stormed  and  fumed  against 
the  tyranny  of  the  "Press  Bureau,"  the  innocuous  title 
chosen  for  the  Juggernaut  which,  before  six  months 
had  passed,  was  to  grind  British  journalistic  liberties 
into  the  dust.  It  was  discovered  that  the  "Bureau"  was 
staffed  for  the  most  part  by  amiable  gentlemen  no 
longer  fit  for  active  duty  in  the  army  and  navy,  who, 
having  patriotically  offered  their  services  to  King  and 
country,  had  been  pitchforked  indiscriminately  into  bil- 
lets which  clothed  them  with  more  real  influence  on 
the  war  than  if  they  had  commanded  armies  or  fleets. 
It  became  painfully  apparent  that  news  of  the  war  was 
being  suppressed,  mutilated  and  generally  mismanaged 
either  by  military  men  who  knew  nothing  of  journal- 
ism, or  by  journalists  who  were  profoundly  ignorant 
of  military  matters — for  the  official  censor  caused  it  to 
be  announced,  in  self-defense,  that  he  had  associated 
with  the  Bureau  in  an  advisory  capacity  a  couple  of 
eminent  ex-editors. 

Just  who  was  responsible  for  annihilating  the  ele- 
mentary rights  of  the  British  Press  never  became 
quite  clear.  Some  blamed  Kitchener.  His  hostility  to 
journalists  and  journalism  was  notorious,  though 
"With  Kitchener  to  Khartoum,"  by  the  most  distin- 
guished special  correspondent  of  our  time,  the  late  G. 
W.  Steevens,  who  died  in  The  Daily  Mail's  service 
during  the  South  African  war,  probably  did  as  much  to 


270  THE   ASSAULT 

give  "K."  a  reputation  as  anything  which  England's 
War  Minister  ever  did  in  the  field.  Others  said 
Joffre  was  the  man  who  had  put  the  lid  on. 
Whoever  laid  down  the  law  saw  that  it  was  relentlessly 
enforced.  Petitions,  protests,  cajolings,  threats,  com- 
plaints, abuse — all  were  in  vain.  The  antics  of  the 
"Press  Bureau"  became  more  exasperating  and  inex- 
plicable from  day  to  day.  Also  more  domineering,  if 
common  report  could  be  believed,  for  presently  Fleet 
Street  heard  that  "K."  had  intimated  to  a  mighty 
newspaper  magnate  that  if  the  latter  did  not  mend  his 
ways,  and  abate  his  insistence,  "K."  had  the  power, 
and  would  not  shrink  from  using  it,  to  incarcerate  even 
a  peer  of  the  realm  in  the  Tower  and  turn  his  entire 
"plant"  into  junk.  That  dire  threat,  I  imagine,  was 
just  one  of  the  myriad  of  chatterbox  rumors  with 
which  the  air  in  England,  all  through  the  war,  fairly 
sizzled.  At  any  rate,  it  failed  utterly  to  curb  the  stormy 
petrel  to  terrorize  whom  it  was  said  to  have  been  ut- 
tered, for  his  onslaughts  on  the  censorship  grew,  in- 
stead of  diminishing,  in  intensity  as  the  "war  in  the 
dark"  proceeded. 

But  it  was  in  its  treatment  of  news  destined  for  the 
United  States  that  the  Press  Bureau  most  convincingly 
revealed  its  lack  of  imagination.  Here  was  Germany 
leaving  no  stone  unturned  to  take  American  sympathy 
by  storm.  The  Bernstorff-Dernburg-Miinsterberg 
campaign  was  in  full  blast.  Von  Wiegand  in  Berlin 
was  interviewing  the  Crown  Prince  and  Princess,  von 
Tirpitz  and  von  Bernhardi,  Zeppelin,  Hindenburg 
and  Falkenhayn,  and  only  narrowly  escaped  interview- 
ing the  Kaiser  himself.  American  correspondents  ar- 
riving in  Germany  were  received  with  open  arms,  and 


YOUR  KING  AND   YOUR   COUNTRY    271 

had  but  to  ask,  in  order  to  receive.  Sometimes  they 
received  without  asking.  They  could  see  anybody  and 
go  anywhere.  That  was  German  efficiency — and  im- 
agination— at  work.  The  Germans  realized  that  we  are 
a  newspaper-reading  community.  They  knew  that  the 
best  way  in  the  world  to  win  American  newspapers'  and 
American  newspapermen's  sympathy  is  to  give  them 
news.  So  they  did  it.  When  the  German  Crown 
Prince  .told  the  correspondent  of  the  United  Press  that 
he  would  "love"  to  see  American  baseball,  that  he 
longed  to  hunt  big  game  in  Alaska,  and  that  Jack  Lon- 
don was  his  favorite  author,  he  broke  a  lance  for  the 
Fatherland's  cause  in  the  United  States  that  a  four- 
hundred-fifty-paged  "unhuman"  British  White  Paper 
could  never  hope  to  equal.  Somebody  with  an  imagina- 
tion— probably  Bernstorff — had  put  a  flea  in  Berlin's 
ear,  and  the  result  was  open-house  for  American  jour- 
nalists for  the  duration  of  the  war. 

What  was  happening  in  London?  There  were 
plenty  of  American  newspapermen  on  the  ground,  not 
only  special  correspondents  who  had  come  over  to  join 
the  British  army  in  the  field,  like  Will  Irwin,  "Bell" 
Shepherd,  Alexander  Powell,  Arthur  Ruhl,  or  Fred- 
erick Palmer,  to  name  only  a  few  of  them,  but  resident 
London  correspondents  who  had  lived  in  England  a 
dozen  years,  like  Edward  Price  Bell  of  the  Chicago 
Daily  News,  Ernest  Marshall  of  the  New  York  Times, 
or  James  M.  Tuohy  of  the  New  York  World,  who 
were  well  known  to  the  British  authorities  as  men  of 
judgment,  integrity  and  responsibility.  But  resident 
or  newcomer,  nothing  but  inconsequential  facilities  or 
the  cold  shoulder  awaited  them  when  they  went  to  the 
» Press  Bureau,  cap  in  hand,  to  ask  even  the  most  rudi- 


272  THE   ASSAULT 

mentary  professional  courtesies  for  themselves  or  their 
papers.  Quite  apart  from  the  indignities  thus  heaped 
on  American  correspondents,  the  Press  Bureau,  when 
it  suppressed  or  butchered  their  dispatches,  left  pitiably 
out  of  account  the  susceptibilities  of  the  great  neutral 
news-devouring  community  which  these  men  repre- 
sented. Therein  lay  the  real  infamy.  Think  of  it. 
Here  was  Great  Britain  and  her  Government  con- 
fessedly anxious  for  American  moral  support  in  the 
war,  and  something  more  than  that,  and  yet  a  subordi- 
nate department  seemed  clothed  with  authority  to  flout, 
exasperate  and  bully  the  agency  directly  responsible 
for  the  production  of  public  sentiment  in  the  United 
States.  I  call  it  a  tremendous  tribute  to  the  sincerity 
and  depth  of  our  loyalty  to  the  Allies'  cause  that  we 
never  for  a  moment  allowed  it  to  waver,  even  in  the 
face  of  the  British  Press  Bureau's  arrant  provocation. 
The  American  Press,  asking  for  bread  in  England,  re- 
ceived a  stone.  That  it  accepted  it,  and  went  on  play- 
ing the  Allies'  game,  has  been  one  of  the  miracles  of 
the  war,  for  which  these  British  Isles  have  reason  to 
be  profoundly  grateful. 

Inherent  imperturbability  and  unimaginative  censor- 
ship thus  combined  in  the  early  weeks  of  the  war,  on 
the  one  hand  to  minimize  popular  conceptions  of  the 
struggle's  magnitude  in  England,  and  on  the  other  to 
smother  enthusiasm  for  it.  You  can  not  fully  realize 
the  immensity  of  the  task  if  you  are  not  permitted  by 
your  overlords  to  see  it  in  its  true  proportions.  You 
can  certainly  not  become  ecstatic  about  it  if  they  insist 
on  having  it  painted  in  exclusively  drab,  routine  and 
joy-killing  tints,  when  they  are  not  covering  it  up  alto- 
gether.  Yet  British  patriotism  was  triumphing  over 


YOUR  KING  AND   YOUR   COUNTRY    273 


5  Questions 
to  those  who 
employ  male  servants 

1.  I"  TAVE  you  a  Butler,  Groom,  Chauffeur, 
A  X  Gardener,  or  Gamekeeper  serving  you 
who,  at  this  moment  should  be  serving  your 
King  and  Country? 

2.  Have  you  a  man  serving  at  your  table  who 
should  be  serving  a  gun? 

3.  Have  you  a  man  digging  your  garden  who 
should  be  digging  trenches? 

4.  Have  you  a  man  driving  your  car  who  should 
be  driving  a  transport  wagon? 

5.  Have  you  a  man  preserving  your  game  who 
should  be  helping  to  preserve  your  Country? 

A  great  responsibility  rests  on  you. 
Will  you  sacrifice  your  personal  con- 
venience for  your  Country's  need? 

Ask  your  men  to  enlist  TO-DAY. 

The  address  of  the  nearest  Recruiting  Office  can 
be  obtained  at  any  Post  Office. 

God  Save  the  King. 


274  THE   ASSAULT 

all  these  natural  and  artificial  handicaps.  Kitchener 
was  not  only  calling  for  five  hundred  thousand  volun- 
teers, but  intimated  that  he  would  soon  be  asking  for 
another  five  hundred  thousand.  He  was  getting  them. 
London  and  the  provinces  were  now  plastered  with  re- 
cruiting posters,  calling  in  compelling  language  for  sol- 
diers. "Your  King  and  Country  Need  You!"  Thus 
ran  the  most  direct  and  frank  appeal.  By  the  tens  of 
thousands  men  answered  it.  The  desecrating  bill-board 
which  we  know  in  America  is  an  unknown  excrescence 
in  the  British  Isles,  but,  for  the  purposes  of  advertis- 
ing for  men  for  "Kitchener's  Army,"  practically  every 
vacant  space  in  the  Kingdom  was  now  turned  into  a 
hoarding.  The  base  of  Nelson's  Column  in  Trafalgar 
Square  was  splashed  red,  white  and  blue,  black  and 
yellow,  green  and  orange,  and  every  other  shade  capable 
of  lending  distinction  to  an  eye-arresting  poster.  The 
great  hotels  and  theaters,  banks,  government  offices, 
and  even  churches,  turned  their  walls  and  windows 
over  to  Kitchener's  advertising  department  for  re- 
cruiting-bills, and  occasionally  themselves  put  up  huge 
signs  across  their  most  imposing  facades  with  such 
legends  as : 

TO  ARMS !  RALLY  ROUND  THE  FLAG ! 

TO  ARMS!  YOUR  COUNTRY  NEEDS  YOU! 

TO  ARMS!  ENLIST  AT  ONCE  FOR  THE  WAR 
ONLY! 

or 

TO-DAY,  YOUNG  MAN,  YOU  ARE  NEEDED 
TO    FIGHT    FOR    YOUR    COUNTRY'S    DE- 


YOUR   KING   AND   YOUR   COUNTRY    275 

FENSE!  FALL  IN!  JOIN  THE  ARMY  AT 
ONCE! 

or 

MEN  OF  BRITAIN,  UPHOLD  YOUR  COUN- 
TRY'S HONOR  AND  LIBERTY!  SERVE  WITH 
YOUR  FRIENDS ! 

or  you  would  read  what  the  King  had  said : 

"NO    PRICE    CAN    BE    TOO    HIGH    WHEN 
HONOR  AND  LIBERTY  ARE  AT  STAKE." 

Even  the  fences  of  the  parks,  the  windows  and  sides 
of  the  omnibuses  and  the  wind-shields  of  the  taxicabs 
reminded  men  every  hour  of  the  day  and  night  that 
"Your  King  and  Country  Need  You." 

I  recall,  with  amusement,  how  "scandalized"  some 
Americans  were  at  England's  resort  to  "circus  meth- 
ods" to  manufacture  an  army.  I  remember  that  pert 
(and  extremely  pretty)  young  Chicago  newspaper- 
woman who,  having  come  over  from  Paris  which  had 
not  needed  to  advertise  for  an  army,  because  France 
had  one,  was  mortified  beyond  words  to  find  London 
screaming  with  "Your-King-and-Country-Need-You" 
sign  literature.  She  was  so  stirred  by  this  "undigni- 
fied exhibition"  that  she  sat  down  before  she  had  been 
in  town  forty-eight  hours  and  dashed  off  to  her  paper 
just  what  she  thought  about  "degenerate  Britain."  She 
was  convinced  that  a  nation  so  "hopelessly  unpatriotic" 
that  it  had  to  advertise  for  defenders  was  "doomed." 
Her  erudite  observations  made  a  deep  impression  on 
her  editors,  who,  in  a  learned  editorial  asked  gravely 
whether  the  British  Empire-  was  "reaching  the  Diocle- 
tian period  of  the  Romans." 


276  THE   ASSAULT 

4  Questions 
to  the 
Women  of  England 


1.  "\7"OU  have  read  what  the  Germans  have 

X    done  in  Belgium.     Have   you  thought 
what  they  would  do  if  they  invaded  England? 

2.  Do  you  realise  that  the  Safety  of  your  Home 
and  Children  depends  on  our  getting  more 
men  now? 

3.  Do  you  realise  that  the  one  word  'Go"  from 
you  may  send  another  man  to  fight  for  our 
King  and  Country? 

4.  When  the  War  is  over  and  your  husband  or 
your  son  is  asked,  'What  did  you  do  in  the 
great  War?" — is  he  to  hang  his  head  because 
you  would  not  let  him  go? 

Women  of  England  do  your  duty! 
Send  your  men  to-day  to  join  our  glori- 
ous Army. 

God  Save  the  King. 


YOUR   KING   AND   YOUR   COUNTRY    277 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  Kitchener's  project  to  advertise 
for  an  army  was  the  one  ray  of  imagination,  and  a 
boundlessly  encouraging  one,  which  the  War  Office 
had  so  far  revealed.  It  showed  even  more  imagination 
in  entrusting  the  technique  of  the  scheme  to  a  profes- 
sional, Mr.  Hedley  F.  Le  Bas,  who,  besides  bringing  to 
the  task  the  expert  knowledge  of  a  publisher,  had  once 
been  a  trooper  in  the  15th  Hussars,  and  knew  and 
loved  the  army.  Mr.  Le  Bas  modestly  disclaims  credit 
for  originating  the  plan  to  create  an  army  of  millions 
by  advertisement.  He  says  that  the  Duke  of  Welling- 
ton beat  him  to  it.  A  hundred  years  ago,  when  Eng- 
land was  at  grips  with  the  oppressor  of  that  day,  a 
poster  appeal  for  soldiers  was  issued,  which  is  prima 
facie  evidence  that  advertising  is  not  a  modern  inven- 
tion. Only  a  few  Englishmen,  and  probably  still  fewer 
Americans,  are  aware  that  even  in  Napoleonic  times 
advertising  for  an  army  was  de  rigueur,  and  as  the  in- 
vitation to  "The  Warriors  of  Manchester"  was,  to  a 
certain  extent,  the  spiritual  inspiration  of  Kitchener's 
remarkable  recruit-getting  campaign,  I  make  no  apolo- 
gies, despite  its  raciness,  for  reproducing  on  the  fol- 
lowing page  a  document  of  genuinely  historical  value. 

The  methods  to  which  the  American  Democracy 
has  resorted  to  secure  soldiers  for  her  wars  were 
also  in  the  minds  of  Lord  Kitchener  and  Mr.  Le  Bas. 
Indeed,  the  practises  of  President  Lincoln,  in  respect 
of  raising  armies,  were  the  model  to  which  the  British 
Government  from  the  start  determined  to  adhere.  It 
was  discovered  that  Lincoln  and  Seward  had  not 
shrunk  from  appealing  to  the  men  of  the  North  from 
the  hoardings  and  through  the  newspapers,  while  the 
advertisements  of  the  United  States  army  and  navy 


To  the  Warriors  of 
Manchester. 


ii— utttut  m* 


IN  thefe  times  of  common  danger,   when  the  ruthless  Plunderer  of 
Nations  would  convert  Englifh  Liberty  into  French  Opprefllon,  there 
is  .no  alternative  between  refiftance  or  flavery:   we  mud  all  be 
Soldiers}  our  fervices  will  be  thankfully  received  either  in  England  or 
abroad.    You,  therefore,  who  feel  a  pleafure  in  feeing  Foreign  Gountries, 
have  now  an  opportunity  of  vifiting  Gibraltar,  where  Soldiers  are  looked 
upon  as  Kings,  and  are  Co  much  reflected,  that  Spaniards  come  into  the 
Garrifbn,  and  returning  to  theif  friends,  cry  *  Who  would  be  a  Spanish 
Prince  that  had  the  power  to  be  an  English  Soldier?"     Here  you  will  be 
envied  by  the  men.    You  will  be  courted  and  adored  by  the  women. 
Would  you  make  your  Fortune  with  the  Sex  ?    Here  are  Ladies  of  all 
Countries  to  chufe  out  of— Love  fpeaks  for  itfelf;  and  they  know  that 
Britons  excel  in  its  attributes.    Warriors  of  Manchester,  clothe  yourfelves 
in  red— convince  thefe  Ladies  you  ate  Englifhmen,    Here  alfo  is  an  Afy- 
lum  for  thofe  noble-hearted  Young  Men,  who  have  had  fpirit  enough  to 
get  into  debt  by  drinking  the  Health  of  their  Sovereign,  and  have  not 
the  means  of  paying  thofe  who  have  been  fo  patriotic  as  to  truft  them : 
In  addition  to  thefe  two  advantages,  Gibraltar  affords  many  peculiar  com- 
forts ;  a  fine  healthy  climate,  fubject  to  no  excefs  of  heat  dr  cold,  plenty 
of  provifions,  fuch  as  beef,  mutton,  potatoes,  6cc,  abundantly  cheap ;  belt 
port  wine  three-pence  per  quart;  rum,  gin,  brandy,  ditto,  ten-pence;  to- 
bacco at  the  following  rates  per  pound :  high  dried,  fourtccn-pence,  fhort 
cut,  thit  teen-pence  half-penny,  fhag  and  pigtail,  one  milling.    Then  there 
is  fruit  of  all  forts,  in  fuch  quantities,  that  the  price  is  not  an  object;  me- 
lons, grapes,  pomegranates,  peaches,'  apricots,  arc  fold  at  a  cheaper  ratethan 
apples  in  England;  almonds,  oranges,  and  figs,  are  as  common  as  hedge 
nuts,  crabs  and  floes,    In  fhort,.  the  luxury  is  fo  felf-evident,  that  when 
one  fees  a  fat  Soldier  in  this  Country,  it  is  a  common  proverb  to  fay, "  Such 
a  one  has  b<en  living  at  Gibraltar."    Can  any  wife  man,  then,  be  fb  blind 
to  his  own  intereft,  as  to  relinquifh  the  certainty  of  fo  many  lading  ad- 
vantages',  for  the  "momentary  gratification  of  a  few  guineas  additiona 
bounty  ?    No  —  Gibraltar  is  the  place  for  a  Soldier  —  Seven  Pounds 
Ten  Shillings  is  the  Bounty  allowed  by  his  Majefty,  and  is  more  than  fuf- 
ficient  to  make  you  comfortable  on  your  paflage.    The  only  conflderation 
for  you  is,  what  Regiment  will  be  the  mofl  defirable  for  you  to  enter? 


YOUR   KING   AND   YOUR   COUNTRY    279 

during  the  Spanish-American  War  were  a  modern  ex- 
ample of  recruiting  measures  in  a  country  where  the 
absence  of  conscription  compels  a  Government,  in  the 
hour  of  emergency,  to  scrape  an  army  together  by 
hook  or  crook.  Then  the  constant  advertising  by  our 
War  and  Navy  departments,  even  in  peace-times, 
proved  that  there  must  be  efficacy  in  asking  men  to 
serve  their  country  in  posters,  magazines  or  newspaper- 
columns  in  which  they  were  also  being  persuasively 
urged  to  buy  automobiles,  "quality"  clothes  or  shav- 
ing-sticks. Kitchener's  "advertising  campaign"  was 
destined,  before  the  war  was  old,  to  be  the  target  of 
bitter  attack,  but  the  skill,  persistence  and  comprehen- 
siveness with  which  it  was  prosecuted  played  an  im- 
mense role  in  the  creation  of  the  greatest  volunteer 
army  in  history.  It  opened  a  new  epoch  in  advertising 
and  clothed  that  art  with  a  distinction  which  will  never 
be  taken  from  it.  The  seal  of  an  Empire  has  been 
placed  on  the  maxim  that  it  pays  to  advertise. 

By  the  end  of  October,  after  three  months  of  war, 
the  muster  of  the  British  Empire  was  in  full 
progress.  Complacency  and  nonchalance  in  London 
were  still  wretchedly  wide-spread,  but  the  call  of  the 
Motherland  for  soldiers  was  echoing  around  the  world. 
Wherever  Britons  were  domiciled,  it  was  answered.  It 
penetrated  into  far-off  British  Columbia,  where  young 
Englishmen,  comfortably  settled  in  new  existences, 
abandoned  them  unhesitatingly.  It  was  heard  in  even 
more  distant  climes,  like  Australia,  New  Zealand  and 
Africa,  where  adventurous  spirits  who  had  crossed  the 
seas  to  seek  their  fortunes  in  lands  of  promise  were 
now  dominated  by  no  other  ambition  than  to  "do  their 
bit"  for  King  and  country.    Even  emigrated  Irishmen, 


280  THE   ASSAULT 

long  irreconcilable,  were  electrified  by  John  Redmond's 
clarion  message,  and  they,  too,  turned  their  faces  home- 
ward. By  the  ides  of  November  whole  shiploads  of 
repatriated  Britons,  returning  from  the  four  points  of 
the  compass,  reached  the  island  shores,  fired  by  one 
consuming  purpose. 

These  home-coming  patriots  were  not  only  render- 
ing valiant  service  by  placing  their  lives  at  the  King's 
disposal,  but  they  were  demonstrating,  along  with 
native-born  Canadians,  South  Africans,  New  Zealand- 
ers,  Australians  and  Indians,  that  one  of  Germany's 
fondest  dreams  was  the  hollowest  of  fantasies.  I  had 
been  familiar  for  years  with  a  German  political  litera- 
ture based  on  the  roseate  theory  that,  once  Great  Brit- 
ain was  embroiled  in  a  great  European  war,  her  world- 
wide Empire  would  crack  and  tumble  like  a  house  of 
cards  in  a  holocaust.  Had  not  Sir  Wilfred  Laurier  on 
a  famous  occasion  declared  that  Canada  would  never 
be  "drawn  into  the  vortex  of  European  militarism"? 
Were  not  the  Boers  thirsting  restlessly  for  revenge 
and  the  hour  of  deliverance  from  the  British  yoke? 
Were  not  Republican  sentiments  notoriously  rife  in 
Australia  and  New  Zealand,  and  would  not  Labor  Gov- 
ernments in  those  remote  regions  seize  eagerly  on  cov- 
eted opportunity  to  snap  the  silken  cords  which  bound 
them  to  England,  and  declare  their  independence? 
Would  not  India,  the  enslaved  Empire  of  the  vassal 
Rajahs,  leap  at  the  throat  of  an  England  preoccupied 
in  Europe  and  drive  the  tyrant  into  the  sea?  These 
were  the  thoughts  which  were  discussed  by  Teuton 
political  seers  as  something  more  than  things  which 
Germany  merely  desired  and  hoped  for.  They  were 
treated  as  axiomatic  certainties.    The  rally  round  the 


YOUR  KING  AND   YOUR   COUNTRY    281 

Union  Jack  by  the  Britons  of  Australia  and  New  Zea- 
land, Canada  and  South  Africa,  Nova  Scotia  and  Ja- 
maica, Barbadoes  and  Ceylon,  British  Guiana  and 
Mauritius,  Newfoundland  and  New  Brunswick,  was 
Germany's  great  illusion.  When  the  "conquered 
Boers"  under  Botha,  the  "alienated  Irish"  under  Red- 
mond, the  "rebellious  Indians"  under  maharajahs  and 
princes,  even  the  "downtrodden"  black  Basutos,  Ba- 
rotses,  Masai  and  Maoris  of  Africa  and  Australasia 
under  their  native  chieftains,  announced  that  they,  too, 
were  ready  to  bleed  for  the  Empire,  Germany's  awak- 
ening was  rude  and  complete.  London  might  be  cal- 
lous, pleasure-loving  and  unperturbed.  But  the  Empire 
was  alive  both  to  the  peril  and  the  duty  of  the  hour, 
and  when  it  vowed  to  face  the  one  and  absolve  the 
other  an  oath  was  sworn  which  spelled  British  invinci- 
bility. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

WAR  IN  THE  DARK 

IT  is  November,  1914.  Britain  is  waking,  but  is  far 
from  awake.  Nearly  everybody  and  everything  are 
proud  to  be  "as  usual."  The  Fleet  has  been  able  to  se- 
cure but  one  action  with  the  Germans — Beatty's  smash- 
ing blow  at  the  Kaiser's  cruiser  squadron  in  the  bight 
of  Heligoland.  A  great  trophy  of  the  engagement  is  in 
hand — Admiral  von  Tirpitz'  son,  watch-officer  in  the 
Mainz,  a  prisoner  in  Wales.  For  a  month  and  more  the 
war  has  been  raging  furiously  in  the  west  all  the  way 
from  the  Alps  to  the  North  Sea.  Antwerp  is  taken, 
after  a  farce-comedy  attempt  at  relief  by  levies  of  raw 
British  naval  reserves.  Joffre  is  at  sanguinary  grips 
with  the  "Boches"  in  the  Aisne  country.  The  twelve  or 
fifteen  miles  of  British  front  in  the  northernmost  cor- 
ner of  France  and  that  patch  of  Flanders  not  yet  in  the 
enemy's  hands  is  the  scene  of  ceaseless,  desperate  com- 
bat. Jellicoe's  dreadnoughts  and  destroyers  take  part 
at  intervals  in  the  grim  battle  for  the  channel  coast. 
Ostend  has  fallen. 

The  German  objective  farthest  west  is  now  clear. 
The  Berlin  newspapers  head-line  the  tidings  from  Flan- 
ders "the  Road  to  Calais."  Major  Moraht  in  the 
Tagcblatt  acknowledges  that  the  campaign  for  the 
base  from  which  Napoleon  essayed  to  invade  England 
is  "a  matter  of  life  or  death"  for  the  Germans.     Sir 

282 


WAR    IN    THE    DARK  283 

John  French  and  the  remnant  of  Belgium's  little  army- 
steel  themselves  for  a  stone-wall  defense.  Again  and 
again  they  keep  the  frenzied  enemy  at  bay.  Have  you 
ever  seen  Harvard  holding  the  Yale  eleven  on  the  five- 
yard  line  three  minutes  before  the  call  of  time  in  the 
last  half,  with  dark  gathering  so  fast  that  you  could 
hardly  distinguish  crimson  from  blue?  Do  you  re- 
member Yale's  ferocious  first,  second,  third,  yet  always 
vain,  attempts  to  batter  and  plunge  her  way  through 
Harvard's  concrete,  immobile  phalanx?  If  you  do, 
and  if  your  red-blooded  heart  has  tingled  at  some  such 
spectacle  of  young  American  bulldoggedness,  which 
can  be  seen  West  as  well  as  East,  in  the  North  and  in 
the  South,  just  as  commonly  as  in  the  New  Haven 
bowl,  you  will  be  able  to  visualize,  infinitesimally,  the 
titanic  grapple  around  Dixmude,  Ypres  and  the  Yser 
in  the  bloody  days  and  hellish  nights  of  October  and 
November,  1914.  "The  Watch  in  the  Mud"  was  the 
way  German  military  critics  praraphrased  their  na- 
tional anthem,  to  describe  the  situation  in  Flanders, 
for  the  Belgians  had  now  flooded  the  region  contiguous 
to  the  Yser  Canal,  and  the  Kaiser's  legions,  in  their 
breathless  thrust  for  Calais,  were  fighting  in  mire  and 
slush  to  their  boot-tops.  More  than  one  company  of 
Feldgrauer  was  ingloriously  drowned. 

The  British  were  engaged  in  precisely  the  operation 
for  which  their  temperament  best  fits  them — "hold- 
ing." The  German  attack  rocked  against  them  re- 
morselessly, giving  neither  assailant  nor  defender  rest 
or  quarter.  But  the  bulldog  "held."  He  was  mauled 
unconscionably  and  bled  profusely.  Thousands  upon 
thousands  of  his  teeth  were  knocked  out,  and  he  was 
half-blind,  and  limped.    Yet  he  "held."    Winter  had 


284  THE   ASSAULT 

come.  Men  lived  in  trenches  which  had  been  merely 
water-logged  ditches,  but  were  now  frozen  into  rock. 
The  German  eagle,  hammered,  of  course,  no  less  cru- 
elly than  the  bulldog,  was  still  screaming  and  clawing, 
in  his  mad  desire  to  cleave  a  way  to  Calais.  But, 
mangled  and  scarred  as  he  was,  the  bulldog  barked 
"No!"  He  had  set  his  squatty  bow-legs,  disjointed 
though  they  were,  squarely  across  "the  Road  to  Ca- 
lais." There  he  intended  to  stay.  It  could  be  traversed, 
that  road,  only  through  a  welter  of  blood  which,  re- 
gardless as  German  commanders  are  of  the  cost  when 
they  set  themselves  an  objective,  gave  the  General  Staff 
at  Berlin  furiously  to  ponder. 

I  have  already  intimated  that  Britain  all  this  tem- 
pestuous while  was  rubbing  her  eyes,  but  was  only  par- 
tially open-eyed.  It  was  not  altogether  Britain's  fault. 
The  immutable  Censorship  still  gave  the  public  no  real 
glimmer  of  the  history-making  struggle  going  on  al- 
most within  ear-shot  of  the  chalk-cliffs  of  Dover. 
Throughout  the  entire  month  of  October,  four  weeks 
as  crammed  with  death  and  glory  as  in  all  England's 
martial  history,  Sir  John  French  was  permitted  to  take 
the  public  into  his  confidence  but  on  one  single  occa- 
sion— and  that,  a  dispatch  dealing  with  operations  six 
weeks  old!  For  its  news  of  the  heroic  deeds  and 
Spartan  sufferings  of  the  greatest  army  it  ever  sent 
abroad,  the  British  Empire  was  compelled  to  depend  on 
stilted  French  communiques  and  the  fantastic  or  irrele- 
vant narratives  of  an  official  "eye-witness  at  British 
Headquarters,"  who  was  allowed  to  bamboozle  the  na- 
tion for  months  before  his  flow  of  mediocrity  and 
piffle  was  choked  off  by  disgruntled  public  opinion. 
England  was  fighting  her  greatest  war  in  Cimmerian 


WAR    IN   THE   DARK  285 

darkness.  Casualty  lists,  terrible  in  their  regularity 
and  magnitude,  kept  on  coming,  but  of  the  coincident 
imperishable  triumphs  of  British  sacrifice  and  courage, 
not  a  word.  One's  Illustrated  London  News  and 
Sphere  printed  depressing  double-pages  weekly,  filled 
with  pictures  of  England's  masculine  flower  killed  in 
action  "somewhere  in  France"  or  "somewhere  in  Flan- 
ders." But  of  the  manner  in  which  their  precious  lives 
had  been  laid  down,  of  the  price  they  had  made  the 
Germans  pay  for  them,  not  a  syllable.  If  by  accident 
some  correspondent  or  newspaper  secured  the  account 
of  an  engagement,  which  ventured  so  much  as  to  hint 
with  some  picturesqueness  of  detail  how  Englishmen 
were  dying,  the  Press  Bureau  guillotine  came  down  on 
the  narrative  with  a  crash  which  taught  the  offender 
to  mend  his  ways  for  the  future. 

Under  the  circumstances  it  was  not  surprising  to 
hear  well-founded  reports  that  recruiting  was  falling 
off.  In  the  clubs  men  said  that  Kitchener's  "first  half- 
million"  was  in  hand,  but  that  men  for  the  second 
five  hundred  thousand,  for  which  the  War  Office  had 
now  called,  were  holding  back  to  a  disappointing,  and 
even  disquieting,  degree.  Meantime  the  popular  ballad 
of  the  hour  was,  appropriately,  Paul  Rubens'  "Your 
King  and  Country  Want  You" — "a  women's  recruiting 
song,"  as  its  sub-title  runs.  Its  opening  verse  and 
chorus  tell  their  own  story : 

We've  watched  you  playing  cricket 

And  every  kind  of  game. 
At  football,  golf  and  polo, 

You  men  have  made  your  name. 


286  THE   ASSAULT 

But  now  your  country  calls  you 

To  play  your  part  in  war, 
And  no  matter  what  befalls  you, 

We  shall  love  you  all  the  more. 
So,  come  and  join  the  forces 

As  your  fathers  did  before. 

CHORUS 

Oh !    We  don't  want  to  lose  you, 

But  we  think  you  ought  to  go. 
For  your  King  and  your  Country 

Both  need  you  so ! 
We  shall  want  you,  and  miss  you, 

But  with  all  our  might  and  main 
We  shall  cheer  you,  thank  you,  kiss  you, 

When  you  come  back  again ! 

These  words,  in  prosaic  type,  look  banal.  Their  ap- 
peal seems  trite.  Yet  rendered  to  plaintive  melody 
by  such  an  operatic  artist  as  little  Maggie  Teyte, 
they  went  straight  to  men's  hearts.  They  must 
have  sent  thousands  upon  thousands  of  cricketers,  foot- 
ballers, golfers  and  poloists — that  is  a  classification 
which  takes  in  pretty  nearly  all  Englishmen — into 
khaki  and  training-camps.  But  the  growing  insistence 
with  which  the  walls  and  windows  of  Old  England 
were  plastered  with  recruiting  posters — even  entire 
front  pages  of  newspapers  were  now  employed  to  ad- 
vertise that  "Your  King  and  Country  Need  You" — 
indicated  that  Kitchener's  army  was  not  being  built 
up  yet  by  the  desired  leaps  and  bounds.  Obviously  the 
war  needed  some  other  kind  of  advertising  than  even 


WAR   IN   THE   DARK  287 

the  accomplished  Mr.  Le  Bas  could  give  it.  It  was  not 
strange  that  the  enthusiasm  of  Englishmen,  cheated  of 
the  chance  to  know  what  was  really  going  on  at  the 
front,  was  beginning  to  find  expression  in  other  direc- 
tions. 

It  was  not  magnificent,  for  example,  but  it  was  nat- 
ural, that  Englishmen  should,  in  all  the  circumstances, 
reveal  a  very  materialistic  passion  to  "capture  Ger- 
many's trade."  Denied  the  opportunity  of  "en- 
thusing" over  events  at  the  seat  of  war,  they  proceeded 
to  dedicate  themselves  energetically  to  the  task  of 
eliminating  the  Germans  as  a  factor  in  the  markets  of 
the  world.  A  profound  book  on  the  subject  appeared 
— The  War  on  German  Trade,  with  the  sub-titles  of 
"Ammunition  for  Civilians"  and  "Hints  for  a  Plan  of 
Campaign."  My  old  friend,  Sidney  Whitman,  the  dis- 
tinguished author  of  Imperial  Germany,  dignified  it 
with  a  preface.  England  had  not  entered  upon  the  war 
"in  a  commercial  spirit  or  with  a  commercial  purpose," 
he  said,  "yet  it  behooves  her  to  seize  and  hold  fast  the 
ripe  fruit  which  has  dropped  into  Englishmen's  lap — 
as  a  first  incident  in  the  clash  of  nations."  The  volume 
had  frankly  been  published,  explained  Whitman,  "with 
the  purpose  of  stimulating  the  English  manufacturer 
and  the  English  trader  to  seize  the  opportunities  thrust 
upon  them  by  the  war." 

Then,  as  the  Censorship,  as  callous  to  criticism  and 
abuse  as  if  it  were  a  sphinx,  still  insisted  that  English- 
men must  fight  and  die  in  the  dark,  as  far  as  their  kith 
and  kin  were  concerned,  patriotism  at  home  found 
vent  in  a  crusade  against  the  Germans  still  at  large  on 
British  soil.  They  numbered  thousands.  They  were 
a  distinct  and  undeniable  danger.    In  days  of  peace 


288  THE   ASSAULT 

they  spied  patriotically  and  flagrantly,  thanks  to  John 
Bull's  easy-going,  guileless  toleration  of  the  stranger 
within  his  gate.  Personally  I  never  believed  that  the 
German  waiters  and  barbers  in  the  Savoy  or  the  Carl- 
ton, and  their  myriad  of  confreres  elsewhere  in  the 
country,  were  the  advance  guard  of  the  German  army 
of  invasion  in  disguise.  Nor  did  I  imagine  (as  I  actu- 
ally made  a  very  British  friend  once  seriously  believe) 
that  Appenrodt's  restaurants  in  the  Strand  and  Picca- 
dilly were  in  reality  masked  commissariat-stations  of 
the  Kaiser's  General  Staff.  Nor  could  even  so  persua- 
sive an  authority  as  William  Le  Queux,  author  of 
German  Spies  in  England,  convince  me  that  every 
German  resident  who  kept  homing-pigeons,  owned  a 
country-place  near  the  East  Coast  suitable  for  wireless, 
or  got  drunk  on  the  Kaiser's  birthday  in  the  Gam- 
brinus  restaurant  in  Glasshouse  Street,  was  a  paid 
member  of  the  Berlin  secret-service.  Most  of  these 
stories  made  me  smile  as  broadly  as  the  "star"  rumor 
of  the  war — the  story  that  seventy  thousand  armed 
Russians  had  been  "actually  seen"  by  Heaven  knows 
how  many  veracious  Britons  sneaking  across  England 
from  Newcastle  to  Southampton,  on  their  stealthy  way 
from  Archangel  to  the  Western  allied  front. 

Yet  it  was  palpably  not  the  hour  for  German  sub- 
jects, any  number  of  them  of  military  age  and  ardor, 
to  be  at  large  in  England.  So  Britain,  in  a  tardy  man- 
ifestation of  self-preservation,  began  to  arrest  and  in- 
tern the  Kaiser's  hapless  subjects,  who  hitherto  had 
suffered  no  impairment  of  their  liberties  except  deten- 
tion in  the  country,  compulsory  visits  to  the  police, 
and  restriction  of  movement  (except  by  special 
permission)  to  an  area  five  miles  from  their  domicile. 


WAR    IN    THE   DARK  289 

The  German  is  far  too  much  of  a  patriot  to  be  trusted 
to  do  as  he  pleases  in  a  country  with  which  his  Father- 
land is  at  war.  He  never  forgets  that  he  is  a  German 
first,  and  a  stock-broker  earning  commissions  in  Lon- 
don, a  barber  taking  English  tips,  or  a  waiter  spilling 
English  soup,  afterward.  It  is  always  Deatschland, 
Dcutschland  iibcr  Alles  with  him.  He  may  not  have 
made  a  profession  or  habit  of  writing  home  to  Berlin 
or  Hamburg,  Cologne  or  Breslau,  Kiel  or  Wilhelms- 
haven,  what  he  noted  of  interest  at  Aldershot,  Ports- 
mouth, Dover,  Woolwich,  or  Sheerness,  or  what  his 
English  friends  might  from  time  to  time  tell  him  of  in- 
terest at  the  Admiralty  or  the  War  Office.  But  it 
was  "bomb-sure,"  as  the  Teuton  idiom  rather  appro- 
priately puts  it,  that  if  ever  a  British  state  secret  fell 
into  Herr  Apfelbaum's  hands  on  the  Stock  Exchange, 
or  into  Johann's  in  the  "hair-dressing  saloon"  of  the 
Ritz,  or  into  Gustav's  at  the  grillroom  of  the  Picca- 
dilly, that  morsel  would  sooner  or  later  find  its  way  to 
Germany.  When  one  considered  that  Englishmen  of 
the  highest  class — one  even  said  the  King  had  a  Ger- 
man valet! — were  attended  night  and  day,  in  their 
homes,  their  clubs,  their  offices  and  their  favorite 
"American  bars,"  hotels,  grillrooms,  cafes  and  restau- 
rants by  Germans,  with  eyes  to  see  and  ears  to  hear,  it 
was  small  wonder  that  an  irresistible  cry  was  sent  up 
before  the  winter  of  war  had  advanced  very  far,  that 
these  "enemy  aliens"  should  not  be  merely  ticketed, 
labeled  and  superficially  watched,  but  placed  behind 
barbed-wire,  with  British  sentries  on  guard.  And  so 
it  came  to  pass  that  Mr.  McKenna,  Home  Secretary, 
whose  reluctance  to  intern  the  Germans  gossip  ab- 
surdly ascribed  to  his  "German  connections,"  finally 


290  THE    ASSAULT 

ordered  "the  enemy  in  our  midst"  to  be  rounded  up. 
Not  all  of  them  were  at  first  taken.  Thousands  re- 
mained at  liberty.  The  British  are  a  patient  and  a 
trusting  clan. 

It  was  not  only  the  acknowledged  German  sub- 
ject in  Great  Britain  who  was  the  object  of  the  anti- 
Teuton  crusade.  The  naturalized  German,  in  many 
cases  the  holder  for  years  of  a  certificate  of  British 
citizenship,  was  made  to  feel  the  blight  of  the  wave  of 
passion  sweeping  over  the  country.  Naturalized  Ger- 
mans have  won  in  England  wealth  and  eminence  out- 
stripping even  the  heights  to  which  they  have 
climbed  in  the  United  States.  In  the  preceding  reign 
they  were  the  bosom  companions  of  the  Sovereign. 
King  Edward's  intimate  circle  contained  the  Cologne 
financier,  Sir  Ernest  Cassel,  and  another  Prussian  na- 
tive, Sir  Felix  Semon,  was  His  Majesty's  Physician 
Extraordinary.  In  the  "City,"  London's  Wall  Street, 
German  financiers  almost  dominated  the  picture.  Baron 
Schroeder  (naturalized  only  within  a  few  hours  of 
the  outbreak  of  the  war)  was  so  great  a  power  that 
citizenship  was  practically  thrust  upon  him  as  a  meas- 
ure of  vital  British  self-protection.  Sir  Edgar  Speyer, 
like  Cassel  a  member  of  the  King's  Privy  Council,  and 
a  Baronet  besides,  was  not  only  a  City  magnate,  but 
controlled  London's  vast  system  of  surface  and  under- 
ground traction  lines,  including  the  omnibus  service; 
yet  his  English  counting-house  was  a  branch  of  a  par- 
ent establishment  in  Frank fort-on-Main.  These  were 
a  few  of  the  outstanding  names  among  the  "Germans" 
in  high  place  in  England.  They  by  no  means  ex- 
hausted the  list.  Domiciled  in  this  country  for  years, 
they  had,  while  openly  maintaining  sentimental  rela- 


WAR   IN    THE    DARK  291 

tions  with  their  Fatherland,  played  no  inconspicuous 
role  in  British  affairs,  economic  and  political.  Any 
number  of  naturalized  Germans  were  married  to  Brit- 
ish women  and  were  fathers  of  British-born  families. 
Scores  of  their  sons  were  already  wearing  King 
George's  khaki  in  Kitchener's  army.  Sir  Ernest  Cas- 
sel  had  given  five  thousand  pounds  to  the  Prince  of 
Wales'  National  Relief  Fund.  Yet  rumor  shortly  after- 
ward had  him  locked  up  in  a  traitor's  cell  in  the  Tower 
of  London!  No  matter  how  acclimatized  these  nat- 
uralized Germans  had  become,  no  matter  how  long  they 
had  been  British  subjects — in  many  cases  their  title  to 
that  distinction  was  half  a  century  old — they  found 
themselves  under  a  ban.  They  were  not  physically  mal- 
treated. Their  windows  were  not  broken.  Men  did  not 
spit  in  their  faces.  They  were  permitted  (like  the  rest 
of  the  British)  to  do  "business  as  usual,"  except  the 
stock-brokers,  who  were  invited  to  keep  off  'Change. 
But  they  were  a  marked  class.  If  they  ventured  to 
visit  clubs  in  Pall  Mall  or  St.  James  Street,  to  which 
they  had  paid  dues  for  years,  they  were  confronted 
with  notices  reading: 


Members  of  German  or  Austrian  national- 
ity are  requested,  in  their  own  interests,  not 
to  frequent  the  club  premises  during  the  war, 
and  British  members  are  asked  not  to 
bring  to  the  club  any  guests  of  enemy  na- 
tionality. 


Or,  if  the  naturalized  German,  no  matter  whether  his 
boy  had  just  fallen  at  Ypres  or  not,  went  to  his  fa- 


292  THE   ASSAULT 

vorite  golf -club  of  a  Saturday  or  Sunday,  he  received 
a  greeting  to  the  same  effect.  The  virtue  of  tolerance, 
a  prized  British  quality,  was  vanishing  from  the  face 
of  these  war-ridden  isles. 

The  anti-German  fury  in  England  claimed  an  early 
victim  and  a  shining  mark — His  Serene  Highness  Vice- 
Admiral  Prince  Louis  of  Battenberg,  who,  as  First 
Sea  Lord  of  the  Admiralty,  was  practically  in  su- 
preme control  of  British  strategy  at  sea.  Prince  Louis 
is  a  native-born  Austrian,  and  although  he  had  been  a 
naturalized  British  subject  and  attached  to  the  Royal 
Navy  since  1868,  and  in  1884  married  into  the  British 
Royal  Family  by  wedding  his  own  cousin,  Princess 
Victoria  of  Hesse,  a  grand-daughter  of  Queen  Vic- 
toria, a  campaign  inaugurated  and  mercilessly  prose- 
cuted by  the  aristocratic  Morning  Post,  led,  on  Oc- 
tober 29,  to  the  Prince's  resignation.  Public  opinion 
unreservedly  approved  the  disappearance  from  a  post, 
from  which  it  was  not  too  much  to  say  the  destinies 
of  the  Empire  were  controlled,  of  a  man  who  was 
brother-in-law  of  Prince  Henry  of  Prussia,  the  In- 
spector-General of  the  German  Navy,  and  of  the 
Grand  Duke  of  Hesse,  one  of  the  Kaiser's  federated 
allies.  The  same  spirit  of  "Safety  First"  which  sent 
the  German  barbers  and  waiters  to  camps  in  Frith  Hill 
and  the  Isle  of  Man  dispatched  Vice-Admiral  Prince 
Louis  of  Battenberg  into  official  oblivion.  Nobody 
actually  distrusted  his  patriotism.  But  England  was 
in  no  humor  to  run  even  remote  risks.  He  had  to  go. 
Satisfaction  over  Battenberg's  retirement  was  only 
slightly  modified  by  a  later  revelation  that  it  was 
Prince  Louis  himself,  and  not  Mr.  Churchill,  as 
universally    supposed,    who    was    chiefly  responsible 


WAR    IN    THE    DARK  293 

for  the  mobilization  of  the  British  Fleet  just  before 
the  outbreak  of  war  in  consequence  of  having  "com- 
manded the  ships  to  stand  fast,  instead  of  demobilizing 
as  ordered." 

November  was  a  month  of  kaleidoscopic  sorrow 
and  joy  for  the  British.  It  began  in  gloom,  with  Tur- 
key's entry  into  the  war  and  the  inherent  menace  to 
Egypt  which  that  event  denoted.  Then  came  the  great 
naval  action  off  Chili,  with  first  blood  to  the  Kaiser  in 
the  only  regulation  stand-up  battle  in  which  British 
and  German  warships  had  so  far  met.  The  sinking 
of  Admiral  Sir  Christopher  Cradock's  flagship,  the 
cruiser  Good  Hope,  and  her  companion,  the  Mon- 
mouth, by  Admiral  Count  von  Spee's  cruiser  squad- 
ron, with  the  loss  of  one  thousand  four  hundred 
precious  lives,  was  a  bitter  blow.  Lord  Charles  Beres- 
ford,  under  whom  Cradock  had  once  served,  told  me 
that  his  death  was  a  more  serious  loss  to  the  British 
Fleet  than  a  squadron  of  cruisers. 

It  was  a  depressing  beginning  for  the  First  Sea 
Lordship  of  Lord  "Jackie"  Fisher,  who  succeeded 
Prince  Louis  of  Battenberg.  Churchill  was  still  First 
Lord  of  the  Admiralty — what  we  in  the  United  States 
should  call  Secretary  of  the  Navy — but  Fisher,  as  First 
Sea  Lord,  was  in  practical  control  of  everything  con- 
nected with  the  actual  activities  of  the  Fleet.  The  First 
Lord  of  the  Admiralty's  business  is  to  get  ships  for  the 
navy.  The  First  Sea  Lord's  task  is  to  man,  arm  and 
fight  them.  Fisher  lost  no  time  in  angry  remorse  over 
Cradock's  disaster.  He  set  about  to  repair  it.  He  ap- 
plied forthwith  the  "Fisher  touch."  He  ascertained 
that  it  was  Rear-Admiral  Sir  Frederick  Doveton  Stur- 
dee,  Chief  of  the  War  Staff,  who  had  been  chiefly  re- 


294  THE    ASSAULT 

sponsible  for  dispatching  Cradock's  squadron  to  waters 
in  which  it  would  have  to  meet  a  German  force  superior 
in  both  tonnage  and  gun-power.  Whereupon  Fisher  or- 
dered Sturdee  to  place  himself  at  the  head  of  a  squad- 
ron which  was  to  find  and  destroy  von  Spee,  and 
not  come  back  until  it  had  done  so.  Sturdee  "de- 
livered the  goods"  with  neatness  and  dispatch.  Al- 
most a  month  later  to  the  day — it  is  a  fortnight's  jour- 
ney from  British  waters  to  the  Southern  Atlantic  even 
for  twenty-seven-knot  battle-cruisers — he  carried  out 
Fisher's  imperious  orders.  On  December  8  Cradock 
was  gloriously  avenged.  Von  Spee  in  his  flagship,  the 
Scharnhorst,  together  with  the  sister  cruiser  Gneisenau 
and  the  smaller  Leipzig,  was  sent  to  the  bottom  off  the 
Falkland  Islands,  and  the  remaining  units  in  the  Ger- 
man squadron,  the  Dresden  and  Nilrnberg,  were  ac- 
counted for  later.  Britain  breathed  easier.  The  bull- 
dog breed  in  her  navy  was  still  to  be  relied  upon. 
Everybody  instinctively  felt  that  there  was  any  num- 
ber of  more  Sturdees  and  ships  and  guns  and  sailors 
ready  to  do  equally  invincible  service  for  England  if 
the  Germans  would  but  give  them  the  chance  von  Spee 
had  offered  at  the  Falklands. 

Spirits  which  had  drooped  when  Cradock  was  lost 
were  revived  ten  days  later  by  the  most  welcome  piece 
of  naval  news  the  British  people  had  had  since  the  war 
began — the  destruction  of  the  Kaiser's  champion  com- 
merce-raider Emden  by  the  Australian  cruiser  Sydney 
off  the  Cocos  Islands  and  the  capture  of  her  intrepid 
commander,  Captain  von  Muller,  and  many  of  his 
crew.  The  Emden  sank  seventeen  ships  and  cargoes 
worth  eleven  million  dollars  before  her  career  was 
ended.  But  von  Muller  won  universal  renown  and  even 


WAR   IN    THE   DARK  295 

popularity  in  Great  Britain  for  his  daring,  "sports- 
manship" and  gallantry  to  vanquished  merchantmen. 
Germans  do  not  appreciate  such  a  spirit,  and  do  not 
deserve  to  be  its  beneficiary — the  utter  lack  of  the 
sporting  instinct  in  the  Fatherland  is  responsible  for 
that  unfortunate  fact — yet  if  von  Miiller  had  been 
landed  a  prisoner  of  war  in  England  and  could  have 
been  paraded  down  Pall  Mall,  he  might  have  counted 
confidently  on  a  welcome  which  Englishmen  custo- 
marily reserve  for  their  own  heroes.  Here  and  there  in 
London  protests  were  raised  against  the  encomiums 
which  almost  every  newspaper,  and  for  the  matter  of 
that  almost  every  Englishman,  uttered  in  praise  of  von 
Miiller's  vindication  of  the  nobility  of  the  sea,  but  the 
overwhelmingly  prevalent  opinion  was  that  he  had 
"played  the  game"  and,  pirate  though  he  was,  deserved 
well  of  a  race  which  still  holds  high  the  traditions  of 
the  naval  service. 

Ever-changing  and  stirring  were  November's  events 
— the  capitulation  of  Germany's  prized  Chinese  colony 
of  Kiau-Chau  to  the  besieging  Japanese ;  Lord  Roberts' 
tragic  death  in  the  field  among  the  soldiers  he  loved  so 
well,  the  Indians  who  had  come  to  Europe  to  fight 
Britain's  battles;  the  still  victorious  advance  of  the 
Russians  in  East  Prussia,  though  Hindenburg's  smash- 
ing blow  in  the  Tannenberg  swamps  had  been  delivered 
many  weeks  before;  the  honorable  acquittal  of  Rear- 
Admiral  E.  C.  T.  Troubridge,  commanding  the  Med- 
iterranean cruiser  squadron,  on  the  charge  of  having 
allowed  the  German  cruisers  Goeben  and  Breslau  to 
slip  through  his  meshes  into  Constantinople — the  Ad- 
miral had  applied  for  a  court-martial,  to  clear  himself 
of  a  grotesque  accusation  that  a  relationship  with  the 


296  THE   ASSAULT 

captain  of  the  Goeben  had  induced  him  to  let  the  Ger- 
mans through.  But  all  these  things  combined  left  no 
such  indelible  impression  on  my  mind  as  the  Lord 
Mayor's  dinner  at  the  Guildhall  in  the  city  of  London 
on  the  night  of  November  9.  That  function,  the 
inauguration  of  the  new  chief  magistrate,  is  celebrated 
in  British  history  as  the  annual  occasion  on  which  lead- 
ers of  the  State  promulgate  some  great  new  line  of 
Governmental  policy — a  national  keynote  for  the  year 
to  come.  The  Guildhall  dinner  in  the  midst  of  Britain's 
greatest  war  was  sure  to  be  of  immemorial  significance, 
and  my  heart  beat  high  with  anticipation  when  Lord 
Northcliffe  assigned  me  to  attend  it  and  record  an 
American's  impressions  of  England's  most  august 
feast. 

Guildhall  was  the  scene  of  a  famous  flamboyancy  by 
the  Kaiser  not  so  many  years  ago,  when  he  had  talked 
about  the  comparatively  firmer  consistency  of  blood 
compared  to  water  and  consecrated  himself  to  the  cause 
of  Anglo-German  peace  and  friendship.  I  was  keenly 
anxious  to  hear  what  sort  of  sentiments  would  echo 
through  the  century-old  sanctuary  of  the  City  to-night, 
with  men  like  Asquith,  Balfour,  Kitchener,  Churchill 
and  Cambon,  the  French  Ambassador,  as  the  speakers. 
I  looked  forward  to  an  evening  sure  to  be  crowded  with 
imperishable  memories.  I  was  not  disappointed.  At 
midnight  when  it  was  all  over,  I  sat  down  to  write  "an 
American's  impressions"  for  The  Daily  Mail,  and  as 
they  were  exuberant  with  the  freshness  of  mental  sen- 
sations just  experienced  and  have  not  cooled  in  the 
sincerity  of  their  utterance  in  the  long  interval  which 
has  supervened,  I  make  no  apology  for  repeating  them 
herewith  verbatim : 


WAR   IN   THE   DARK  297, 

"When  I  became  the  joyful  recipient  of  an  invita- 
tion to  attend  last  night's  Guildhall  banquet  I  reveled 
in  the  prospect  of  a  feast  of  Bacchanalian  pomp  and 
pageantry.  I  expected  to  witness  nothing  much  ex- 
cept a  Lord  Mayor's  'show,'  translated  into  Lucullian 
environment,  a  riot  of  food,  drink,  cardinal  robes, 
gold  braid,  gold  chains,  gold  sticks,  wigs  and  the  other 
trappings  of  mayoral  magnificence.  I  came  away  ut- 
terly disillusioned,  for  I  had  spent  three  hours  in  what 
will  live  in  my  recollection  as  the  Temple  of  British 
Dignity. 

"Those  stately  Gothic  walls,  whose  simple  groups 
of  statuary  which  tell  of  Wellington  and  Nelson  and 
Beckford;  those  amazingly  non-panicky  war  speeches 
of  your  Romanesque  premier,  your  grim  Kitchener, 
your — and  our — Winston  Spencer  Churchill,  and  your 
polished  Balfour,  all  made  me  feel  that  I  was  tarry- 
ing for  the  nonce  within  four  walls  which,  if  they  did 
not  envelop  all  the  great  qualities  of  the  British  race, 
at  least  typified  and  epitomized  them. 

"Guildhall  is  dignified  by  itself  beyond  my  feeble 
hours  of  description.  I  have  never  trod  its  historic 
floors  before,  but  I  have  the  unmistakable  impression 
that  it  has  taken  on  fresh  dignity  to-day  for  the  words 
which  were  spoken  in  it  yestereve.  I  was  about  to 
say,  in  the  idiom  which  springs  more  naturally  to  the 
lips  of  an  American,  'for  the  words  which  rang 
through  it.'  Words  were  not  made  to  'ring*  through 
Guildhall.  They  would  be  ludicrously  out  of  place. 
An  American  political  spellbinder,  no  matter  how  sil- 
ver-tongued, would  pollute  the  atmosphere  of  London's 
civic  shrine.     Its  acoustic  qualities,  which  I  should 


298  THE   ASSAULT 

think  were  not  faultless,  are  intended  for  exclusively 
such  oratory  as  put  them  to  the  test  last  night. 

"Guildhall's  tone  is  the  tone  of  Mr.  Asquith — 
'practicing  the  equanimity  of  our  forefathers,  the  fluc- 
tuating fortunes  of  a  great  war  will  drive  us  neither 
into  exaltation  nor  despondency.'  I  thought  that  strik- 
ing phrase  of  a  brilliant  peroration  British  character  in 
composite.  It  was  more  than  that.  It  was  Guild- 
hallian.  The  cheers  for  the  Premier,  like  those  for 
Balfour,  Churchill  and  Kitchener,  would  have  been 
more  vociferous  in  my  country.  But  my  country  is 
not  British.  We  are  not  devoid  of  dignity,  I  hope,  but 
we  have  no  Guildhall." 

It  was  left  to  other  hands  to  report  in  detail  the 
speeches  of  the  Prime  Minister,  the  First  Lord  of  the 
Admiralty  and  the  Secretary  of  War.  Each  uttered 
phrases  of  golden  significance.  Mr.  Churchill  was 
evidently  still  his  ebullient  self,  although  he  had  not  yet 
fulfilled  his  promise  of  September  that  the  German 
navy,  if  it  remained  in  port  and  refused  to  come  out, 
would  be  "dug  out  like  a  rat  from  a  hole,"  nor  had  his 
now  acknowledged  personal  responsibility  for  the  fiasco 
of  the  Antwerp  naval  expedition  perceptibly  staled  his 
infinite  buoyancy.  "Six,  nine,  twelve  months  hence," 
he  declared,  "you  will  begin  to  see  the  results  that  will 
spell  the  doom  of  Germany."  I  had  never  heard  "Win- 
ston" speak  before,  but  I  understood  now  the  charm  of 
his  personality  and  the  attractiveness  of  an  oratorical 
style  made  even  more  magnetic  by  the  suggestion  of  a 
combined  stammer  and  lisp.  "In  spite  of  its  losses,"  he 
continued,  "our  Navy  is  now  stronger,  and  stronger 
relatively  to  the  foe,  than  it  was  on  the  declaration  of 


WAR   IN    THE    DARK  299 

war."  Asquith  read  his  speech,  and  Kitchener  was 
about  to  do  the  same,  but  Churchill,  youthful,  vibrant, 
tense,  spoke  extemporaneously,  and  the  consequent 
effect  was  indubitably  the  most  striking  of  all  the 
oratory  of  the  night. 

Lord  Kitchener,  in  khaki  and  with  a  mourning  band 
on  his  arm,  was  redolent  of  strength  and  impressive- 
ness,  but  when  he  rose,  clumsily  adjusted  a  pair  of 
huge  horn-rimmed  reading  glasses,  and  began  to  chant 
his  carefully-prepared  "speech"  in  monotone  from 
manuscript,  he  was  far  less  convincing,  and  certainly 
not  approximately  so  electrifying  as  Churchill.  But 
he  had  messages  of  no  less  magnitude  and  cheer.  "We 
may  confidently  rely  on  the  ultimate  success  of  the 
Allies  in  the  west,"  he  said  simply.  "But  we  want 
more  men  and  still  more  men.  We  have  now  a  million 
and  a  quarter  in  training." 

But  it  was  Asquith's  peroration,  at  which  my  im- 
pressionistic sketch  in  The  Daily  Mail  only  hinted, 
which  was  the  nugget  of  the  night.  Englishmen  still 
repeat  it  as  something  which  puts  in  more  terse  and 
concrete  words  than  anybody  else  has  clothed  it  the 
solemn  spirit  in  which  they  have  consecrated  themselves 
to  the  task  now  trying  the  Empire's  soul : 

"It  is  going  to  be  a  long,  drawn-out  struggle.  But 
we  shall  not  sheathe  the  sword  until  Belgium  recovers 
all,  and  more  than  all,  she  has  sacrificed ;  until  France 
is  adequately  secured  against  the  menace  of  aggres- 
sion; until  the  rights  of  smaller  nations  are  placed  on 
an  unassailable  foundation ;  until  the  military  domina- 
tion of  Prussia  is  finally  destroyed." 


300  THE   ASSAULT 

It  was  in  that  incorrigible  resolve  that  Britain  en- 
tered upon  the  second  calendar  year  of  war,  bleeding 
uncomplainingly,  losing  stoically,  taking  what  came  and 
ruing  it  not;  determined  as  she  lived,  to  keep  on  until 
her  vow  to  herself  was  vindicated  and  her  duty  to 
civilization  performed. 


CHAPTER  XIX 


THE  INTERNAL  FOE 


BRITAIN'S  autumn  of  complacency  faded  un- 
ruffled into  a  winter  and  spring  of  lassitude  and 
bungle.  Nothing,  no  matter  how  ominous  or  catastro- 
phic, seemed  capable  of  rousing  the  nation  to  the  im- 
mensity of  its  emergency.  The  Kingdom  was  aflame 
with  recruiting  posters,  in  ever  increasingly  lurid  hues 
and  language,  but  with  amazingly  little  red-blooded 
interest  in  or  enthusiasm  for  the  war.  If  one  com- 
mented on  the  oppressive  and  disconcerting  nonchal- 
ance of  the  populace,  one  was  called  a  "Dismal 
Jimmy,"  or  a  "professional  whimperer"  whose  mind 
was  poisoned  by  the  "Northcliffe  Press."  If  you 
remarked  that  indications  were  countless  that  the 
enemy  was  vastly  more  alive  to  the  stupendousness 
of  the  moment  than  England  seemed  to  be,  you  were 
set  down  for  a  "pro-German,"  and  the  patriot  whose 
guest  you  were  when  you  ventured  that  suggestion 
never  invited  you  to  dinner  again.  If  you  were  an 
Englishman,  you  were  simply  snubbed  henceforth.  If 
you  were  a  foreigner,  your  name  may  have  been 
handed  in  to  Scotland  Yard  as  that  of  an  "alien" 
worth  watching.  Whoever  you  were,  or  whatever 
your  views,  unless  they  represented  unadulterated  ad- 
miration of  unshakable  British  calm,  you  were  headed 

301 


302  THE   ASSAULT 

straight  for  a  crushing  rebuke.  Retribution  took  the 
form  of  branding  you  either  as  pitiably  ignorant  of 
"British  character"  or  not  knowing  history  well 
enough  to  realize  that  the  British  are  "slow  starters" 
and  "always  muddle  through  somehow."  You  were 
advised  to  squander  your  qualms  on  a  needier  cause. 
The  "boys  of  the  bulldog  breed"  were  "all  right." 

You  wondered,  if  you  were  a  blithering,  neurotic 
American,  for  example,  what  would  stir  the  British 
temperament  into  something  faintly  resembling  ardor 
and  emotion.  Zeppelins  came,  despite  Mr.  Churchill's 
swagger  that  a  horde  of  "aeroplane  hornets"  was  ready 
to  greet  and  sting  them.  They  came  periodically, 
leaving  destruction  in  their  wake,  but  the  coast  towns 
are  one  hundred  fifty  miles  away  from  London,  and 
nobody  cared.  They  had  demonstrated,  it  was  true, 
that  England  was  no  longer  an  island,  but  "they  can't 
reach  London — that's  one  sure  thing,"  and,  "anyway, 
the  time  to  worry  about  that  was  when  they  tried  it." 
Was  not  the  metropolis  magnificently  equipped  with 
searchlights,  even  if  the  sky-pirates  should  attempt 
the  impossible  and  try  to  pick  their  way  up  the  Thames 
in  the  dark  ?  Then,  always,  there  were  those  "hornets," 
and  "British  coolness." 

"Scarborough  Shelled  by  German  Cruisers !"  So  ran 
the  newspaper  posters  in  the  streets  at  midday  of  De- 
cember 16th,  1914,  an  announcement  grim  with  histori- 
cal import.  For  the  first  time  in  centuries  the  sacred 
shores  of  these  sea-girt  isles  had  felt  the  impact  of  bom- 
bardment. The  raid  extended  far  along  the  Yorkshire 
coast.  Whitby  and  Hartlepool  had  been  attacked — 
there  were  a  hundred  deaths  in  the  latter  alone.  Ma- 
terial damage  was  extensive;  homes,  shops,  hotels, 


THE   INTERNAL   FOE  303 

churches,  hospitals  were  struck  and  shattered.  Yet 
England  was  "calm."  It  did  not  matter  in  the  least 
that  there  was  a  list  of  seven  hundred  Britons  dead 
and  injured,  or  that  the  Kaiser's  "Canal  Fleet"  appar- 
ently was  able  to  risk  a  sortie  in  the  North  Sea.  What 
mattered  most  was  that  the  islanders  still  alive  were 
unmoved  and  immovable.  That  the  "baby-killers"  by 
air  and  water  had  signally  failed  to  "excite"  or 
"frighten"  the  country  was  the  circumstance  which 
made  incomparably  the  liveliest  appeal  to  the  imagina- 
tion. Kitchener's  astute  recruiting  advertisers  shrieked 
"Remember  Yarmouth!"  (where  the  Zeppelins  had 
been)  and  "Avenge  Scarborough!"  across  the  top  of 
their  newest  posters,  but  West  End  London,  where  the 
seats  of  the  mighty  are,  and  where  the  opinion  which 
gives  tone  to  national  thought  is  molded,  remained 
Gibraltarian.  A  flock  of  British  aeroplanes  assailed 
Cuxhaven  on  Christmas  Day  by  way  of  "reprisal"  for 
the  intermittent  Zeppelin  raids  over  English  territory. 
The  attack  was  not  noteworthy  in  its  results,  but  it 
gave  a  fresh  fillip  to  British  confidence  that  "every- 
thing was  all  right." 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  "everything"  was  about  as  all 
wrong  as  it  could  be.  Beneath  the  surface  of  national 
life  a  volcano  was  boiling  and  sputtering,  and  though 
it  gave  early  and  unmistakable  evidence  of  its  pres- 
ence, British  calm  with  invincible  indifference  tossed 
it  off  as  a  sporadic  manifestation  unworthy  of  serious 
consideration.  I  refer  to  the  Labor  question — to  trade- 
unionism's  revolt  against  reorganization  of  industry 
for  the  purposes  of  war,  and  to  its  stubborn  opposi- 
tion to  the  introduction  of  compulsory  military  serv- 
ice.   As  long  ago  as  January,  the  Labor  controversy 


304  THE   ASSAULT 

raised  its  hydra-head,  and  yet,  in  October,  despite 
nine  months  of  subsequent  turmoil,  it  only  began  to 
be  recognized  for  what  it  is — the  peril  which 
threatens  these  isles  with  danger  hardly  less  gigantic 
than  invasion  itself.  It  is  the  decade-old  British  story 
of  temporizing  with  impending  menace,  oblivious  of  its 
portent,  serenely  conscious  only  that  it,  too,  can  be 
"muddled  through,"  like  everything  else  in  Britain's 
glorious  past.  It  is  the  spirit  in  which  Britain  almost 
invited  war  with  Germany,  the  flaming  warnings  of 
which  the  islands  had  for  years. 

The  workmen  on  the  Clyde,  the  engineers,  mechanics 
and  artisans  responsible  for  the  maintenance  of  British 
life  itself — for  in  their  hands  rests  the  creation  of  the 
ironclads  to  preserve  England  from  invasion  and  the 
merchantmen  to  bring  food  to  her  shores — were  the 
first  to  cause  the  volcano  to  rumble.  They  objected 
to  "overtime."  The  process  of  "speeding  up"  in  every 
department,  due  to  the  iron  necessities  of  war,  was 
violating  the  most  sacred  traditions  of  trade-unionism. 
If  not  forcibly  checked,  practises  tolerated  in  the  name 
of  emergency  were  in  imminent  peril  of  becoming 
fixed  rules.  The  Clyde  workmen  struck.  They  paid 
no  heed  to  Sir  George  Askwith,  the  Chief  Industrial 
Commissioner,  when  he  declared  that  "the  require- 
ments of  the  nation  were  being  seriously  endangered." 
Jellicoe  urgently  needed  those  six  new  destroyers  wait- 
ing to  be  riveted.  But  the  Clyde  engineers  wanted  the 
overtime  question  settled,  and  settled  in  their  way ;  and 
until  it  was,  the  navy  could  go  hang.  Englishmen  were 
disappointed  when  they  read  the  news  from  Glasgow 
and  Greenock,  but  they  were  not  upset.  Matters  would 
"right  themselves."     Trade-unionists  were  an  "un- 


THE    INTERNAL   FOE  305 

reasonable  lot."    But  they  always  "came  around."   At 
any  rate,  there  was  no  cause  to  "worry." 

One  man,  a  big  man,  was  "worrying."  He  was 
Lloyd-George,  whose  specialty  is  taking  bulls  by  their 
horns.  Being  Welsh,  it  was  not  "un-English"  for  him 
to  dignify  an  emergency  with  its  intrinsic  importance 
and  act  accordingly.  He  grasped  instantly  the 
menace  which  the  situation  on  the  Clyde  conjured  up. 
With  decision  of  Napoleonic  boldness  in  a  politician 
to  whom  report  ascribed  the  ambition  to  hoist 
himself  into  a  dictatorship  on  the  shoulders  of  the 
"masses,"  Lloyd-George  determined  to  "speed  up"  in- 
dustrial England  for  war  by  Act  of  Parliament.  If 
labor  would  not  voluntarily  throw  trade-union  dogma 
to  the  wind  when  national  existence  was  at  stake,  the 
possibility  of  imperiling  it  should  simply  be  taken  from 
them.  Thereupon  he  introduced  in  the  House  of  Com- 
mons an  amendment  to  the  "Defense  of  the  Realm 
Act,"  which  provided  for  nothing  short  of  Industrial 
Conscription.  Emerged  later  as  the  Munitions  Act, 
it  conferred  enormous  powers  upon  the  Government. 
Reduced  to  essentials,  it  robbed  Labor  of  the  right  to 
strike.  It  forbade  lockouts,  as  well.  It  provided  for 
compulsory  arbitration  of  all  disputes.  It  withheld 
from  a  workman  the  right  to  leave  one  employment 
and  take  another.  It  obliterated  primarily  and  abso- 
lutely that  holiest  of  holy  trade-union  regulations,  by 
which  output  is  restricted.  On  the  other  hand,  it  pro- 
vided for  the  limitation  of  employers'  profit  by  estab- 
lishing a  system  of  "controlled  establishments,"  i.  e., 
works  engaged  exclusively  in  the  production  of  muni- 
tions for  the  Government  and  whose  financial  opera- 
tions could,  therefore,  be  exactly  checked. 


306  THE    ASSAULT 

The  Munitions  of  War  Act  was  Great  Britain's 
longest  step  in  the  direction  of  Industrial  Socialism. 
It  emanated  with  singular  appropriateness  from  Lloyd- 
George,  the  father  of  the  German-imported  system  of 
old  age  pensions  and  workmen's  insurance  introduced 
six  years  previous.  Trade-unionism  was  aghast  at 
the  radicalism  of  the  new  proposals,  which  Mr.  Bal- 
four rightly  described  as  the  "most  drastic"  for  which 
British  Parliamentary  sanction  had  ever  been  sought. 
Lloyd-George  only  partially  subdued  Labor's  misgiv- 
ings by  pledging  the  Government's  word  that  the 
scheme  applied  for  the  duration  of  the  war  only,  and 
that  with  peace  the  old  order  of  things  would  be  auto- 
matically reestablished. 

The  men  on  the  Clyde  had  no  sooner  gone  back  to 
work,  reluctantly  and  sullen  after  a  "compromise"  set- 
tlement, when  the  dockers  of  Manchester,  Birkenhead 
and  Liverpool  struck  on  the  overtime  issue.  Lord 
Kitchener,  while  reviewing  troops  in  the  district,  form- 
ally notified  the  Dock  Laborers'  Union  that  if  they 
"did  not  do  all  in  their  power  to  help  carry  the  war  to 
a  successful  conclusion,"  he  would  have  to  "consider 
what  steps  would  be  necessary"  to  hammer  patriotism 
into  their  souls.  "K.'s"  unambiguous  language  sig- 
nally failed  to  impress  the  dockers.  They  remained 
on  strike.  A  deputation  of  shipbuilding  and  shipown- 
ing  firms  now  waited  on  Lloyd-George.  They  told 
him  that  drink,  more  truly  the  curse  of  the  British 
working  classes  than  of  any  other  in  the  world,  was  at 
the  bottom  of  the  rebellious,  lazy  spirit  of  the  men. 
They  urged  prohibition  for  the  period  of  the  war.  The 
deputation  declared  that  eighty  per  cent,  of  avoidable 
loss  of  time  could  be  ascribed  to  drink.    Lloyd-George 


THE    INTERNAL    FOE  307 

sympathized  with  that  view.  "We  are,  plainly,"  he 
said,  "fighting  Germany,  Austria  and  drink,  and  as  far 
as  I  can  see,  the  greatest  of  these  three  deadly  foes  is 
drink." 

Now  the  miners  became  restless.  They  demanded 
a  revision  of  the  wage  scale  in  accordance  with  the 
mine-owners'  notoriously  swollen  war  profits.  Their 
Federation  decided  that  notice  should  be  given  on  April 
1st  to  terminate  all  existing  agreements  at  the  end  of 
June.  There  were  hints  that  the  miners  intended  press- 
ing not  only  for  a  "war  bonus,"  but  for  an  advance  of 
twenty  per  cent,  on  current  wages.  From  the  pits  of 
South  Wales  comes  the  coal  which  is  the  navy's  black 
breath  of  life.  A  week's  idleness  meant  one  million 
tons  unproduced.  The  Government  summoned  the 
Miners'  Federation  for  conference.  Coal  prices  were 
already  soaring.  Here  and  there  there  was  a  shortage 
of  supply.  Germany  was  jubilant.  Labor's  temper 
in  the  Clyde  country,  the  docker  districts  and  in  the 
colliery  regions  was  far  from  improved  by  Lloyd- 
George's  support  of  the  suggestion  that  drink  was  the 
root  of  the  industrial  evil.  The  Chancellor  of  the  Ex- 
chequer essayed  to  play  a  trump  card.  He  announced 
that  King  George,  "deeply  concerned  over  a  state  of 
affairs  which  must  inevitably  result  in  the  prolongation 
of  the  horrors  and  burdens  of  this  terrible  war,"  was 
himself  prepared  to  set  an  august  example  to  Labor  by 
giving  up  all  alcoholic  liquor,  "so  that  no  difference 
should  be  made  as  far  as  His  Majesty  is  concerned 
between  the  treatment  of  rich  and  poor  in  this  ques- 
tion." Working-class  Britain  committed  wholesale 
lese-majeste  by  paying  no  attention  to  the  King's  de- 
cree of  self-denial. 


308  THE   ASSAULT 

The  sequel,  though  not,  of  course,  the  immediate 
result  of  King  George's  total  abstinence  proclamation, 
was  the  outbreak  of  the  South  Wales  miners'  dispute 
in  full  fury  a  few  weeks  later.  Joint  conference  be- 
tween the  Federation,  the  owners  and  the  Government 
ended  in  hopeless  deadlock.  The  miners  stubbornly 
refused  to  accept  the  principle  of  compulsory  arbitra- 
tion provided  by  Lloyd-George's  now  enacted  Muni- 
tions Law.  Two  hundred  thousand  men  stopped  work. 
Threats  to  enforce  the  punitive  provisions  of  the  law 
did  not  terrify  them.  The  establishment  in  Wales  and 
Monmouthshire  of  a  "Munitions  Tribunal,"  before 
which  they  could  be  haled,  only  made  them  more  de- 
fiant. In  London  one  heard  irresponsible  mutterings 
that  "a  few  leaders  of  the  Federation"  might  usefully 
be  shot,  and  it  was  suggested  that  if  England  were 
Germany,  they  would  be.  More  than  one  voice  advo- 
cated lynching  "a  few  owners,"  too.  The  country 
waited  dutifully  for  the  Government  to  employ  the 
"drastic  powers"-  it  had  arrogated  to  itself  only  a  few 
short  weeks  before.  Instead  of  anything  so  heroic, 
it  flung  Lloyd-George  into  the  breach.  It  sent  him 
to  South  Wales,  and  in  his  entourage  went  Arthur 
Henderson,  the  new  Labor  member  of  the  Cabinet,  and 
Mr.  Runciman,  the  President  of  the  Board  of  Trade 
(the  government  department  which  deals  with  indus- 
try). The  little  Welshman  drew  forth  from  his  in- 
exhaustible arsenal  the  weapon  he  seldom  unsheathes 
in  vain — his  persuasively  silver  tongue.  New  terms 
were  drawn  up  between  the  miners  and  the  colliery 
owners.  The  men  got  about  everything  they  wanted. 
"Fill  the  bunkers,"  Lloyd-George  cried  to  them  amid 
their  cheers  in  a  farewell  speech  at  Cardiff.    "It  means 


THE    INTERNAL   FOE  309 

defense.  It  means  protection.  It  means  an  inviolate 
Britain."  The  miners  went  back  to  work.  But  peace 
had  been  dearly  bought  by  the  Government.  It  had 
not  dared  to  enforce  the  coercive  paragraphs  of  the 
vaunted  Munitions  Law.  The  Act,  it  was  now  pain- 
fully evident,  might  do  very  well  to  discipline  a  handful 
of  "shirking-men"  at  some  shell  works  or  shipyard, 
but  to  invoke  its  machinery  to  browbeat  two  hundred 
thousand  organized  miners  was  manifestly  a  horse  of 
a  different  color.  And  one  which  the  British  Govern- 
ment was  not  prepared  to  back.  Industrial  Conscrip- 
tion was  magnificent  in  theory.  In  its  first  great  test 
in  practise  it  had  proved  to  be  fire  with  which  the 
authorities  preferred  not  to  play.  Some  one  (I  think 
it  was  Price  Collier)  called  England  the  Land  of  Com- 
promise. The  Welsh  miners  seem  to  have  shown  that 
he  was  right. 

Events  were  not  long  in  forthcoming  to  demon- 
strate that  neither  forceful  persuasion  by  a  popular 
Cabinet  Minister  nor  "drastic"  Acts  of  Parliament 
were  in  themselves  capable  of  regenerating  the  British 
working  man  or  inspiring  him  with  full  and  patriotic 
realization  of  the  national  emergency.  Shortly  after 
becoming  Minister  of  Munitions  in  May,  Lloyd- 
George  began  a  speech-making  tour  of  the  industrial 
districts.  He  pleaded  eloquently  to  Labor  to  forget 
its  "isms"  and  its  "rules"  and  throw  the  full  weight 
of  its  Titan  strength  into  the  balance  for  the  winning 
of  the  war.  He  addressed  his  appeal  alike  to  masters 
and  men.  Passionately  he  begged  both  to  relegate 
traditions,  suspicions  and  prejudices  and  join  hands 
for  the  common  cause.  He  did  not  mince  words  as 
to  the  national  consequences  if  either  of  them  per- 


310  THE   ASSAULT 

mitted  ancient  antagonisms  to  restrict  their  producing 
power  at  a  moment  when  nothing  short  of  the  Em- 
pire's existence  was  trembling  in  the  balance.  "Pile  up 
the  shells!"  was  the  burden  of  his  plea.  Bristol,  Bir- 
mingham, Sheffield,  Coventry,  Leeds,  Nottingham, 
Manchester,  all  the  great  industrial  centers  of  the 
Kingdom,  listened,  and  promised.  By  the  beginning 
of  autumn  Lloyd-George  had  pledged  nearly  one  thou- 
sand establishments,  hitherto  engaged  in  the  peaceful 
arts,  to  devote  their  plants  exclusively  to  the  manufac- 
ture of  sinews  of  war,  and  employers  and  workmen 
passed  automatically  under  the  "control"  of  the  Min- 
istry of  Munitions.  The  country  seemed  to  be  yield- 
ing effectively  to  Lloyd-George's  project  for  "speed- 
ing up"  war  industry. 

Yet,  as  sporadic  announcements  in  the  newspapers 
presently  indicated,  the  system  was  by  no  means  pro- 
ducing desired  results.  Dogmatic  trade-unionism  was 
dying  hard.  The  Government's  call  to  men  and 
women  to  do  their  "bit"  for  the  war,  either  by  enlist- 
ing in  the  fighting  forces  or  engaging  in  munitions 
work,  naturally  sent  tens  of  thousands  of  people  to 
the  factories  who  never  possessed  a  "union  card"  in 
their  lives.  Organized  Labor  was  horrified  by  the 
deluge  of  "scabs"  thus  created.  It  saw  the  results  of 
decades  of  crusade  for  "union  shops"  and  for  privilege 
for  skilled  hands  swept  away  like  chaff  in  the  wind. 
Another  phenomenon  of  no  less  disagreeable  omen 
was  making  its  appearance.  Marvelous  American 
automatic  lathes  for  shell-making  were  being  installed 
on  a  prodigious  scale — machinery  so  simple  in  con- 
struction that  one  man,  or  even  a  woman  or  girl,  might 
learn  to  keep  five  lathes  running  at  one  time.     This 


THE   INTERNAL   FOE  311 

conjured  up  disquieting  visions  for  the  devotees  of  a 
system  which  looks  upon  arbitrary  limitation  of  out- 
put and  minimum  employment  of  maximum  numbers 
of  skilled  men  as  an  inalienable  heritage  of  Organized 
Labor.  War  might  be  war,  national  existence  might  be 
at  stake,  nothing  else  might  count  except  victory,  to  say 
nothing  of  a  dozen  other  shibboleths  dinned  incessantly 
into  their  ears,  but  trade-unionists  had  "rights"  and 
"necessities,"  too.  It  had  cost  them  years  of  blood  and 
tears,  and  strikes  and  lockouts  galore,  to  enforce 
them.  Was  Labor  supinely  to  permit  them  to  be 
snatched  away  bodily  under  cover  of  war,  which  La- 
bor had  always  opposed?  Were  sainted  rules  about 
Sunday  work  and  other  "overtime,"  about  apprentices, 
about  female  labor,  and  a  dozen  other  trophies  of  tri- 
umphant trade-unionism  to  be  renounced  ?  Could  Gov- 
ernments, from  which  hard-won  prerogatives  had  had 
to  be  extorted  almost  by  violence,  be  trusted  voluntarily 
to  restore  them,  once  Labor  had  been  cowed  into  sur- 
rendering them,  and  comfortable  precedents  estab- 
lished? Was  the  British  proletariat,  now  only  on 
the  threshold  of  its  liberties,  to  be  hurled  back 
at  one  fell  swoop  into  the  abyss  of  inglorious  mid- 
Victorian  "slavery"?  Let  the  nation  rant  itself  blue 
in  the  face  over  Labor's  "disgraceful  lack  of  patriot- 
ism." Let  Germany  find  comfort,  if  it  could,  in  the 
spectacle  of  British  working  men  refusing  to  relinquish 
their  holiest  privileges  on  the  blood-smeared  altar  of 
Militarism.  "Patriotism  begins  at  home,"  said  the 
trade-unionist.  "The  Government  is  looking  after  its 
own  interests.  I  am  looking  after  mine,"  he  explained. 
With  such  recalcitrant  and  explosive  conditions  pre- 
vailing, the  public  was  not    surprised,    though  pro- 


312  THE   ASSAULT 

foundly  chagrined,  to  learn  at  the  end  of  September 
— I  choose  the  case  as  typical,  and  by  no  means  because 
it  was  an  isolated  instance — that  the  Liverpool  Muni- 
tions Tribunal  had  fined  hundreds  of  workmen  em- 
ployed by  Messrs.  Cammell,  Laird  &  Company,  one  of 
the  most  important  firms  of  armament  manufacturers 
in  the  country.  It  was  testified  that  owing  to  shirking 
during  the  period  of  the  preceding  twenty  weeks,  there 
had  been  a  loss  of  1,500,000  hours'  time.  The  evi- 
dence is  so  characteristic  that  I  reproduce  it  textually : 

"The  average  daily  number  of  men  employed  was 
10,349,  and  the  average  number  of  men  out  on  each 
day  of  the  week  was:  Monday,  first  quarter,  2,135, 
and  the  whole  day,  1,156;  Tuesday,  1,421  and  1,030; 
Wednesday,  1,439  and  1,231;  Thursday,  1,764  and 
1,126;  Friday,  1,492  and  984;  and  Saturday,  1,057 
and  1,015.  The  average  number  out  per  day  for  the 
whole  period  was  1,552  who  lost  a  quarter,  and  1,090 
losing  the  whole  day.  In  other  words,  fifteen  per 
cent,  lost  a  quarter,  and  about  ten  and  one-half  per 
cent,  did  not  go  into  work  at  all  on  every  day  of  the 
whole  twenty  weeks.  The  loss  of  working  hours  on 
ordinary  working  days  was  a  million  and  a  half,  and 
represented  a  full  week's  work  for  nearly  thirty  thou- 
sand men;  or,  alternatively,  the  time  lost  practically 
represented  a  complete  shutting  down  of  the  whole  es- 
tablishment for  three  working  weeks.  Neither  the 
men  themselves  nor  their  societies  could  plead  ig- 
norance of  what  was  going  on.  Frequent  appeals  had 
been  made  to  representative  deputations  of  the  men  in 
the  works  by  the  managing  director  of  the  company, 
also  to  the  local  representatives  of  the  men's  unions, 


THE   INTERNAL   FOE  313 

pointing  out  this  most  discreditable  state  of  affairs. 
Seeing  that  the  men  had  proved  deaf  to  all  persuasion, 
and  had  shown  no  improvement  in  response  to  appeals 
either  from  Ministers  of  the  Crown,  their  own  trade 
unions,  or  their  employers,  the  only  course  was  to 
prosecute  them  before  that  tribunal." 

The  announcement  of  the  sentences  on  the  shirkers 
caused  an  outbreak  of  dissatisfaction,  and  the  chair- 
man of  the  Tribunal  was  interrupted  several  times  by 
the  men  as  he  was  giving  the  judgments.  Half  a  dozen 
or  more  of  the  men  all  attempting  to  speak  at  once 
caused  great  confusion.  "There'll  be  a  revolution  in 
this  country,"  cried  one,  and  such  phrases  as,  "It's  time 
the  Germans  were  here  if  we  are  to  be  treated  like 
this,"  "What  did  South  Wales  do?  Defy  them!"  "We 
are  not  here  as  slaves"  were  shouted  from  various 
quarters.  The  disturbers  were  asked  to  leave  the 
Court.  "Let's  all  go,"  called  one  of  the  men — and 
they  all  went,  giving  "three  cheers  for  the  British 
workman." 

Labor  pleads  in  extenuation  of  its  seemingly  trea- 
sonable disregard  of  national  interests  that  it  is  not 
merely  reluctance  to  yield  ground  on  fixed  trade-union 
principles  which  inspires  a  spirit  of  revolt  in  the  "mu- 
nition areas."  It  is  only  fair  to  record  that  the  atti- 
tude of  Union  leaders  throughout  has  generally  been 
above  reproach.  Their  counsel  to  the  men  to  forget 
"rules"  and  give  the  best  that  is  in  them  has  in  many 
cases  fallen  on  deaf  ears.  What  particularly  gnawed 
at  the  men's  hearts  was  a  conviction  that  they  were  not 
getting  even  an  approximately  "square  deal"  under  the 
abnormal  conditions  of  "war  industry."    They  insisted 


314  THE   ASSAULT 

that  while  employers'  profits  had  risen  inordinately  in 
almost  every  branch — shipping,  collieries,  the  steel  and 
iron  trades,  and  primarily,  of  course,  in  the  armaments 
industries — the  wages  of  the  men  who  were  doing  the 
actual  producing  lamentably  failed  to  keep  step  with 
the  masters'  swollen  revenue.  The  men  assert,  indeed, 
that  such  advance  in  wages  as  has  taken  place  does 
not  remotely  correspond  to  the  increased  cost  of  liv- 
ing, which  averaged  forty  per  cent,  up  to  the  end  of 
the  summer  of  1915,  with  a  further  rise  in  almost  in- 
evitable prospect.  Labor,  in  other  words,  so  the  work- 
ing classes  claimed,  was  being  "sweated"  in  order  that 
the  coffers  of  the  "profiteers"  might  continue  to  over- 
flow. If  British  trade-unionism  had  an  epigrammatist 
as  inventive  as  Mr.  Bryan,  it  would  no  doubt  have 
adopted  as  its  war-time  slogan  the  aphorism  that  Cap- 
ital was  determined  to  press  down  a  crown  of  thorns 
upon  Labor's  brow,  and  crucify  working  mankind  upon 
a  cross  of  gold.  Those,  at  any  rate,  were  precisely  the 
sentiments  which  fired  British  Labor's  soul. 

But  if  revolt  on  the  old-time  issues  of  output,  over- 
time and  Unionism  was  bitter  and  menacing,  it  was 
destined  to  be  a  mere  whisper  compared  to  Labor's  re- 
bellious hostility  to  Conscription.  The  "controlled  es- 
tablishment" system  evoked  more  or  less  continuous 
opposition.  Almost  every  day  batches  of  workmen, 
ranging  from  twos  and  threes  to  troops  of  fifty  or  a 
hundred,  were  dragged  before  Munition  Tribunals, 
and  fined  a  week's  pay  for  shirking.  In  one  or  two 
cases  they  preferred  the  martyrdom  of  imprisonment 
to  money  punishment.  But  on  the  whole,  notwithstand- 
ing the  ceaseless  howl  of  Ramsay  Macdonald's  Labor 
Leader  and  George  Lansbury's  Socialist  Herald  against  < 


THE    INTERNAL    FOE  315 

the  "tyranny"  and  "slavery"  of  the  Munitions  Act  and 
the  "unchecked  piracy  of  the  employer-profiters,"  the 
ambitions  of  Lloyd-George  to  "speed  up"  war  industry 
were  satisfactorily  realized.  He  was  able  to  state  that 
"taking  the  figure  one  as  representing  the  output  of 
shells  in  September,  1914,  the  figure  for  July,  1915, 
was  fifty'  times  greater.  It  was  a  hundred  times 
greater  in  August,  and  thenceforward  production 
would  continue  to  rise  in  a  surprisingly  rapid  cre- 
scendo." 

By  midsummer  of  1915  Britain  was  faced  by  an 
emergency  not  a  whit  less  urgent  than  shells.  She 
had  effectively  organized  her  facilities  for  turning 
out  a  maximum  of  high-explosives.  She  had  now  to 
confront  and  solve  the  insistent  problem  of  manning 
her  decimated  armies.  Kitchener  and  the  voluntary 
system  had  worked  wonders.  The  actual  figures,  for 
some  unaccountably  censorious  reason,  were  never 
disclosed,  except  in  the  case  of  Ireland,  which  up  to 
October  1  had  furnished  81,000  recruits;  but  the  au- 
thorities allowed  to  pass  uncontradicted  the  statement 
that  the  United  Kingdom  and  the  Colonies  between 
them  had  raised  a  volunteer  army  of  approximately 
3,000,000  men.  Had  it  turned  out  to  be  anything  ex- 
cept a  War  of  Miscalculations,  this  gigantic  contribu- 
tion of  British  military  force  might  have  sufficed,  but 
with  500,000  British  casualties  after  fourteen  months 
of  fighting — roundly,  400,000  in  France  and  Flanders 
and  100,000  in  the  Dardanelles — and  with  the  Germans 
not  only  not  yet  expelled  from  Belgium  or  France,  but 
in  undisputed  possession  of  Poland  and  about  to  pound 
through  Serbia  on  "the  road  to  Constantinople,  Egypt 
and  India,"  it  was  apparent  that  probably  twice  3,000,- 


316  THE   ASSAULT, 

000  British  soldiers  would  be  required.  Two  spectac- 
ular attempts  to  "break  through"  the  wall  of  concrete 
and  iron  Germany  had  erected  in  the  West  had  been 
made.  Both  failed,  however  gloriously.  Neuve 
Chapelle  and  Artois  inscribed  fresh  and  imperishable 
deeds  of  valor  on  the  scroll  of  the  British  army,  but 
each  was  strategically  valueless.  Results  attained  were 
frightfully  out  of  proportion  to  the  price  they  cost  in 
blood  and  treasure. 

Succeeding  events  of  the  war  of  stalemate  in  the 
West  and  fiasco  in  the  Dardanelles — dreary  and  weary 
months  of  fighting  accounted  "victorious"  if  it  took 
three  hundred  yards  of  trenches,  or  a  hill,  or  a  ceme- 
tery, or  a  sugar- factory,  or  a  strip  of  beach,  or  if  it  ad- 
vanced the  British  line  a  mile  and  a  half  over  a  front  of 
twelve  miles — every  "gain"  entailing  a  terrible  toll  in 
killed  and  maimed  and  fabulous  expenditure  of  shells 
— all  demonstrated  one  outstanding,  immutable  fact: 
that  nothing  but  sheer  preponderance  of  man-power 
weight  would  or  could  "cleave  the  way  to  victory." 
If  it  cost  25,000  or  30,000  young  British  lives  to  win 
Neuve  Chapelle,  probably  twice  that  many  to  carry 
out  the  trial  push  of  the  great  offensive  at  the  end  of 
September,  and  100,000  casualties  to  fail  in  Gallipoli, 
what  rivers  of  blood  would  not  have  to  be  spilled  along 
that  once-vaunted  "march  to  Berlin"  ? 

Britain's  volunteers  had  done  nobly.  But  they  man- 
ifestly did  not  do  enough.  Mighty  as  was  their  re- 
sponse, Britons  must  yet  come,  or  be  brought,  forward 
in  their  millions  if  the  Empire  was  to  be  saved.  The 
specter  of  Conscription  became  more  of  a  tangible 
reality  from  day  to  day.  Voluntaryism  had  received 
a  fair  and  a  long  and  patient  trial.     It  accomplished 


i  THE    INTERNAL   FOE  317, 

far  more,  probably,  than  its  most  sanguine  supporters 
hoped  for.  It  outstripped  any  record  approximated  by 
Lincoln  in  our  Civil  War,  but  now,  like  him,  England 
was  plainly  compelled  to  resort  to  more  heroic  meas- 
ures if  the  overthrow  of  Germany  was  to  be  anything 
more  than  a  pious  aspiration.  "Mahanism"  had  given 
Britannia  control  of  the  sea,  but  "Moltkeism"  was  still 
unbeaten  on  the  Continent. 

Now  Organized  Labor  revolted  afresh.  It  would 
not  hear  of  the  "Prussianization"  of  England  by  Con- 
scription. It  had  already  "surrendered"  its  "industrial 
liberty."  It  did  not  propose  to  part  with  whatever 
vestige  of  "personal  freedom"  remained.  It  pilloried 
Conscription  as  "Compulsion"  and,  as  brazenly  as  they 
dared,  certain  leaders  threatened  any  Government 
which  essayed  to  fasten  it  upon  the  "British  Democ- 
racy" with  political  ruin  for  itself  and  gory  revolution 
for  the  country.  The  Conscriptionists  were  accused 
of  wanting,  instead  of  an  army  of  volunteer  freemen, 
"a  servile,  cheap  and  sweated  army."  They  aspired 
to  "something  which  would  imperil  the  civic  basis  of 
British  liberty  and  degrade  the  nation."  Conscription 
was  "desired  for  the  war  and  for  after  the  war,  in 
order  that  its  advocates  might  better  be  able  to  pro- 
mote their  Imperialistic  schemes  abroad  and  their  class 
vanity  and  political  interests  at  home."  In  the  midst 
of  a  war  to  "crush  militarism,"  it  was  now  plotted  to 
impose  that  monster  on  Englishmen  themselves. 
Shrieked  Bruce  Glasier,  for  example,  a  paladin  of  the 
Socialist-Labor  phalanx : 

"Compulsion,  especially  with  regard  to  personal 
service,  to  one's  choice  of  occupation  and  way  of  life, 


318  THE   ASSAULT 

is  of  the  essence  of  slavery  and  oppression.  Nothing 
but  actual  extremity  of  life  and  death  ought  to  justify 
us  in  resorting  to  it  even  temporarily.  No  such  ex- 
tremity has  arisen,  or  is,  happily,  likely  to  arise.  The 
voluntary  principle  has  not  failed  either  in  the  Army 
or  any  other  profession.  What  has  failed,  what  does 
fail,  is  the  political  policy  and  administration  of  the 
Government. 

"Since  the  days  of  Feudal  slavery  in  Great  Britain 
no  man  or  woman,  except  he  be  a  criminal,  a  lunatic, 
or  a  pauper,  has  been  compelled  personally  to  serve  any 
master  or  Government,  or  engage  in  any  occupation  or 
task  by  legal  compulsion. 

"Shall  we  allow  the  old-world  tyranny  to  return?" 

Glasier,  unwittingly,  tapped  the  very  root  of  the  prob- 
lem, as  far  as  his  own  particular  cohorts,  "downtrod- 
den labor,"  are  concerned.  The  British  masses,  in 
their  preponderant  majority,  have  not  been  brought  to 
comprehend  what  Germany's  war  is — that  it  involves 
for  Britain  "nothing  but  actual  extremity  of  life  and 
death."  Although  leaders  of  public  opinion,  from  the 
highest  to  the  lowest,  never  ceased  to  emphasize 
the  true  inwardness  of  the  struggle,  Organized  Labor 
was  not  convinced  that  Voluntary  Service  was  unequal 
to  the  emergency.  At  Bristol,  in  the  first  week  of 
September,  610  delegates  to  the  annual  Trade  Union 
Congress,  representing  nearly  3,000,000  workers, 
placed  themselves  on  record  flat-footedly  against  Con- 
scription. With  British  military  failure  in  the  war 
crying  to  Heaven,  the  following  "anti-Compulsion" 
resolutions  were  adopted : 


THE   INTERNAL   FOE  319 

"We,  the  delegates  to  this  congress,  representing 
nearly  three  millions  organized  workers,  record  our 
hearty  appreciation  of  the  magnificent  response  made 
to  the  call  for  volunteers  to  fight  against  the  tyranny  of 
militarism.  We  emphatically  protest  against  the  sin- 
ister efforts  of  a  section  of  the  reactionary  press  in 
formulating  newspaper  policies  for  party  purposes  and 
attempting  to  foist  on  this  country  Conscription,  which 
always  proves  a  burden  to  workers  and  will  divide  the 
nation  at  a  time  when  absolute  unanimity  is  essential. 

"No  reliable  evidence  has  been  produced  to  show 
that  the  voluntary  system  of  enlistment  is  not  adequate 
to  meet  all  the  empire's  requirements.  We  believe  that 
all  the  men  necessary  can  and  will  be  obtained  through 
a  voluntary  system  properly  organized,  and  we  heartily 
support  and  will  give  every  aid  to  the  Government  in 
its  present  efforts  to  secure  the  men  necessary  to  pros- 
ecute the  war  to  a  successful  issue." 

When  the  cheers  following  the  unanimous  adoption 
of  these  resolutions  subsided,  Robert  Smillie,  the 
miners'  leader  and  one  of  the  most  respected  Labor 
chieftains  in  Britain,  received  the  heartiest  applause  of 
the  whole  debate  when  he  rapped  out :  "Now  that  this 
congress  has  declared,  on  behalf  of  organized  labor, 
that  it  is  against  Conscription,  it  will  be  the  duty  of 
organized  labor  to  prevent  Conscription  taking  place." 

It  was  not  long  after  the  Bristol  Trade  Union  Con- 
gress defied  the  Government  to  establish  Conscription 
that  Vernon  Hartshorn,  the  Socialist  miners'  leader, 
declaimed  in  the  Christian  Commonwealth  that  "a 
golden  opportunity  for  Labor"  had  arrived,  asked 


320  JHE  ASSAULT 

"whether  trade-unions  shall  now  not  be  successfully 
recognized  as  the  controlling  authority  in  a  new  indus- 
trial democracy,"  and  set  up  "the  irresistible  claim  of 
Labor  to  control  its  own  destinies  and  those  of  the 
country."  The  Bristol  and  Hartshorn  manifestoes 
were  followed  by  the  most  extraordinary  outburst  of 
all — the  formal  declaration  on  the  official  premises  of 
the  British  House  of  Commons  by  J.  H.  Thomas,  a 
Member  of  Parliament  for  Derby  and  Organizing 
Secretary  of  the  Amalgamated  Society  of  Railway 
Workmen,  that  if  the  Government  attempted  to  en- 
force Conscription,  3,000,000  employees  of  the  na- 
tional transportation  lines  of  the  country  would  not 
shrink  from  precipitating  "industrial  revolution!" 

Interesting  to  the  foreign  observer  as  are  all  these 
manifestations  of  the  British  masses'  opposition  to 
war-time  "control"  and  universal  military  service,  the 
pathological  causes  of  it  are  no  less  absorbing.  They 
are  not,  in  my  judgment,  far  to  seek.  I  thought  I 
gained  a  composite  glimpse  of  them  one  day  at  Shep- 
herd's Bush,  by  no  means  the  most  squalid  section  of 
London,  for  it  lies  in  the  west,  far  from  the  putrid  east. 
I  had  gone  to  watch  a  great  "recruiting-rally" — an  at- 
tempt to  inject  some  patriotism  into  regions  where  it 
was  sadly  lacking.  I  found  myself  in  the  midst  of  a  huge 
typically  lower-class  and  lower  middle-class  multitude. 
Scattered  throughout  it  were  countless  hundreds  of 
what  should  have  been  young  men  fit  for  military  serv- 
ice. It  was  for  the  most  part  a  motley  throng  of  blear- 
eyed  men  and  women  of  all  sorts,  sizes  and  conditions 
of  mental  and  physical  deterioration.  Nearly  every- 
body, particularly  children,  was  unkempt  and  seemed 
underfed.     In  the  wide-open  doors  of  odoriferous 


THE    INTERNAL   FOE  321 

saloons  stood  hatless,  slovenly  females,  balancing  with 
one  hand  a  half-emptied  mug  of  beer,  while  the  other 
shepherded  a  cluster  of  wretched  youngsters  with  dirty 
faces,  tattered  clothing  and  shredded  shoes.  Collarless 
men  slouched  along,  filthy  of  attire  and  language  alike. 
The  remarks  one  overheard,  as  the  troops  trudged  by 
and  the  bands  blared  Rule,  Britannia,  were  usually 
purely  ribald,  and  the  cheering,  when  a  taxi  full  of 
wounded  Tommies,  shoved  into  the  procession  to  lend 
corroborative  detail  to  what  Sir  W.  S.  Gilbert  would 
have  called  an  otherwise  bald  and  unconvincing  spec- 
tacle, was  desultory  and  short-lived.  The  parade  had 
been  assigned  a  line  of  march  through  several  miles 
of  district  precisely  like  Shepherd's  Bush.  I  could 
hardly  imagine  that  the  scenes  anywhere  were  consid- 
erably different  from  those  of  which  I  was  an  aston- 
ished and  chagrined  witness.  There  were  very  few  re- 
cruits. 

I  could  not  resist  a  reminiscent  soliloquy.  I  had 
stood  in  the  midst  of  German  crowds  in  Berlin  and 
elsewhere  times  without  number.  But  I  was  quite 
sure  that  nowhere  in  the  Fatherland  had  I  ever  been 
in  contact  with  such  concentrated,  omnipresent,  ap- 
parently inconquerable  squalor  and  proletarian  apathy. 
It  was  manifestly  not  this  stratum  of  English  society 
which  was  to  perpetuate  Britannia's  rule  of  the  waves. 
Lamentably  little  of  the  "bulldog  breed"  was  visible 
here.  It  was  more  like  the  starved  cur  type.  Starved ! 
That  was  the  word.  Starved  for  generations  of  the 
nourishment  on  which  health,  education,  ideals  and 
patriotism  must  be  developed,  if  they  are  to  stand  the 
test  in  the  hour  of  supreme  trial !  Why,  I  asked  my- 
self, was  such  a  disheartening  picture  as  good  as  phys- 


322  THE   ASSAULT 

ically  impossible  in  Berlin  or  Hamburg  or  Diisseldorf 
or  Breslau?  I  may  be  wrong,  but  the  answer  seemed 
to  me  to  be  that  paternalistic  Government  in  Germany 
had  produced  a  race  of  men  and  women  who,  because 
better  educated,  better  housed,  better  fed  and  generally 
better  cared  for — even  under  the  relentless  jack- 
boot of  Militarism — looked  upon  a  war  for  national 
existence  through  entirely  different-colored  spectacles 
than  this  slipshod  composite  of  British  illiteracy  and 
nonchalance.  I  seriously  doubted  if  Shepherd's  Bush 
understood  the  meaning  of  Patriotism  as  the  Germans 
know  it ;  understood  that  Service  and  Sacrifice  are  nec- 
essary in  the  hour  of  the  nation's  jeopardy,  and,  be- 
cause necessary,  must  be  lavishly,  unquestioningly 
rendered.  I  found  myself  excusing  the  British  prole- 
tariat. I  felt  that  they  were  what  they  were,  and  act- 
ing as  they  were,  or,  rather,  failing  to  act  as  they 
ought,  because  they  knew  no  better.  Patriotism  is 
not  altogether  instinct.  It  is  largely  a  cultivated  virtue. 
That  is  why  we  teach  immigrant  children  from  Russia 
and  Italy  and  Hungary  to  sing  "My  Country,  'Tis  of 
Thee"  as  the  rudiment  of  their  American  schooling. 
Education  has  been  compulsory  in  Britain  for  many 
years,  but  drink  has  been  traditionally  universal,  and 
housing  of  the  poor  and  the  working  classes  was  only 
in  comparatively  recent  years  deemed  a  subject  worthy 
of  vast  national  effort.  Public  hygiene  is  no  longer  a 
neglected  theme,  and  playgrounds  and  parks  are  nu- 
merous. But  illiteracy,  intemperance  and  disease  can 
not  be  eradicated  in  a  generation.  Masses  which  have 
for  decades  been  neglected  and  held  in  subjection  and 
contempt  by  an  unrelenting  class-distinction  system 


THE    INTERNAL   FOE  323 

heavily  charged  with  arrant  snobbishness  can  not  be 
churned,  by  the  turning  of  a  crank,  into  a  community 
of  enlightened,  high-minded  or  able-bodied  patriots 
and  war-makers.  Britain  has  sown  the  wind.  She  is 
reaping  the  whirlwind.  That  has  been  said  before,  but 
never  has  it  applied  with  such  grim  significance  as  at 
this  hour. 

Recruiting  "rallies,"  recruiting  advertisements,  re- 
proaches of  the  "slacker"  and  the  "shirker"  in  the 
press,  on  the  platform,  in  the  parks  and  from  the 
pulpit,  have  signally  failed  to  shame  lower-class  Britain 
into  doing  its  duty  as  the  upper  and  middle  classes 
have  so  gloriously  done.  In  consequence,  the  Volun- 
tary system  is  on  its  last  legs.  Early  in  October  Lord 
Kitchener  appointed  Lord  Derby  "Director  of  Re- 
cruiting." In  assuming  the  thankless  job,  Derby  said 
he  felt  like  taking  over  the  receivership  of  a  bank- 
rupt concern.  He  proposed  granting  Voluntaryism 
a  six  weeks'  respite.  He  would  give  the  stay-at-homes 
one  more  chance.  The  Government  (which  enacted 
the  National  Register  for  the  purpose — hated  Prus- 
sian system  which  card-indexed  every  male  and  female 
in  the  realm  between  fifteen  and  fifty-five!)  knew  ex- 
actly who  and  where  they  were.  "Push  and  Go,"  said 
one  of  the  last-ditch  poster  appeals,  "But  It's  Better  to 
Go  than  Be  Pushed."  Lord  Derby  intimated  that  "push- 
ing" would  set  in  on  December  1.  It  was  estimated 
that,  by  hook  or  crook,  not  less  than  thirty  thousand 
fresh  men  a  week  would  be  needed  to  keep  the  British 
armies  in  Europe  and  Africa  at  effective  strength  in 
1916,  and,  if  they  did  not  come  forward  voluntarily, 
Kitchener  was  determined  to    "fetch"    them.     That 


324  THE   ASSAULT 

means  Conscription.  Northcliffe  calls  it  National  Serv- 
ice. Shepherd's  Bush  calls  it  National  Servility.  If 
Labor  means  what  it  says,  "Compulsion"  will  not  be 
established  until  Trafalgar  Square  and  White- 
chapel,  Clydebank  and  South  Wales,  have  run  red 
with  the  organized  proletariat's  "freeman"  blood.  On 
Britain's  recreant  past,  then,  rather  than  on  her  em- 
battled present,  will  lie,  in  my  judgment,  the  real  re- 
sponsibility for  that  dread  triumph  of  ignorance  and 
indolence  over  the  elementary  dictates  of  patriotism 
and  self-preservation. 

If  I  have  emphasized  British  Labor's  influence  in 
blocking  National  Service,  I  must,  in  all  fairness,  point 
out  that  brows  not  accustomed  to  sweat  and  hands 
never  grimy  from  toil  have  joined  their  frowns  and 
their  strength  with  Trade-Unionism  and  Socialism 
against  Conscription.  The  professional  pacifists,  the 
"anti-militarists,"  the  statesmen  and  the  newspapers 
which  for  years  prior  to  1914,  and  even  during  the 
weeks  immediately  preceding  August  of  that  year, 
ridiculed  the  idea  of  "war  with  Germany,"  were  all 
mobilized  against  the  revolutionary  idea  of  converting 
able-bodied  Britons  by  law  into  defenders  of  the 
realm.  From  these  quarters  the  men  who  have  dared 
to  advocate  Conscription  have  been  besmirched  with 
abuse  no  less  torrential  than  that  which  was  heaped 
upon  them  at  the  Trade-Union  Congress  in  Bristol  or 
from  week  to  week  in  the  columns  of  Socialist-Labor 
organs.  It  will  not  be  only  certain  famous  proletariat 
leaders  who  prevented  Britain  from  rising  in  the  great 
war  to  her  full  military  stature — if  prevented  she  be — 
but  the  party-hack  editors,  authors  and  anything- for- 


THE    INTERNAL   FOE  325 

office  politicians  who  preferred  the  fetish  of  "our  un- 
enslaved  Democracy"  and  "Voluntaryism"  to  the  sys- 
tem under  which  every  other  single  one  of  Britain's 
Allies  is  righting  and  under  which,  if  the  opinion  of 
professional  soldiers  is  to  be  trusted,  victory  alone  can 
be  made  to  perch  on  the  Union  Jack. 


CHAPTER  XX 

THE  EMPIRE  OF  HATE 

THOUGH  the  end  of  the  carnage  is  not  even  ap- 
proximately in  sight,  a  synoptic  view  of  Germany 
in  war-time  is  feasible  to  a  more  comprehensive 
extent  than  is  possible  in  Britain.  Armageddon  found 
the  Fatherland  completely  caparisoned  for  war,  with 
her  people  so  steeped  in  discipline  that  it  was  the 
merest  formality  to  harness  their  peace-time  habits 
to  Mars'  Juggernaut  and  drive  the  entire  nation  to  bat- 
tle as  one  would  a  well-trained  team.  "Team-work," 
in  fact,  exactly  describes  Germany's  war-time  per- 
formances. They  are  achievements  in  national  unison 
without  parallel  in  history.  Britain,  on  the  other  hand, 
having  been  overtaken  by  war,  except  for  her  navy, 
in  a  state  of  naked  unpreparedness,  was  plunged  forth- 
with into  the  melting-pot.  Traditions,  customs,  insti- 
tutions, hobbies,  prejudices,  fetishes,  even  cherished 
laws,  had  to  be  abandoned,  upset  or  reconstructed  to 
fit  a  world  of  iron  conditions  unsuited  to  a  dreamland 
of  comfortable  theories.  The  remaking  of  Britain, 
after  sixteen  months  of  war,  is  not  yet  ended.  It  has, 
indeed,  hardly  commenced.  The  time  to  write  an  ac- 
curate history  of  these  isles  during  the  Great  Test  will 
come  not  when  peace  is  signed,  but  perhaps  a  decade 
later,  when  the  New  England  will  have  begun  to  as- 
sume, in  misty  outline  at  least,  the  physical,  moral  and 

326 


THE   EMPIRE   OF   HATE  327 

intellectual  dimensions  in  which  war,  with  its  scars  and 
its  cleansings,  left  her. 

Organized  for  war,  body  and  soul,  as  Germany  has 
been  for  generation  upon  generation,  and  never  more 
so,  of  course,  than  in  the  living  generation,  the  coun- 
try slid  into  the  bloody  groove  as  neatly  as  if  it  had 
never  had  its  being  elsewhere.  The  prospect  of  "star- 
vation," for  instance,  quite  apart  from  the  fact  that  it 
was  a  German-invented  bogy  trotted  out  to  deceive 
the  enemy  and  extort  the  commiseration  of  neutrals, 
never  seriously  disturbed  the  Germans'  equanimity, 
for  from  the  cradle  up  frugality  has  been  instilled  in 
them  as  a  virtue  sister  to  patriotism.  No  people  in 
the  world  could  overnight  descend  to  a  war  standard 
of  living  so  rapidly  as  the  Germans.  Accustomed  to 
the  affluence  of  sudden  prosperity  as  the  nation,  as  a 
whole,  was,  it  had  yet  only  to  return  to  familiar  incul- 
cated habits,  when  the  Kaiser  called.  The  grand  Ger- 
man bluff  of  the  first  year  of  the  war  was  the  intro- 
duction of  the  bread-ticket  ration  system.  How  the 
grain-shippers  of  Chicago  and  Duluth  must  have 
chuckled  over  it,  when  they  recalled  the  gigantic  ad- 
vance purchases  of  wheat  made  for  German  and 
Austrian  account  in  May,  1914 — three  full  months  be- 
fore "the  Russian  mobilization  menace !"  Germany 
can  never  be  starved,  and  she  knows  it.  Von  Tirpitz 
knew  it  when  he  proclaimed  submarine  piracy  as  a  "re- 
prisal" for  British  "attempts  to  starve  us  out."  The 
grip  of  the  British  Fleet  around  Germany's  neck  has 
inconvenienced  the  Germans,  but  it  can  never  cause 
them  to  famish.  The  "starvation"  myth  which  the 
German  propagandists  in  the  United  States  so  as- 
siduously circulated  was  devised,  purely  and  simply, 


328  THE   ASSAULT 

for  the  purpose  of  arousing  the  compassion  of  the  gen- 
erous-hearted American  people,  in  the  hope  that  our 
most  sentimental  of  governments  would  intervene,  in 
humanity's  name,  to  lift  from  Germany's  throat  a  yoke 
which  she  herself  was  powerless  to  remove.  That  is 
the  long  and  short  of  the  "starvation"  story. 

As  inborn  and  cultivated  habits  of  frugality  and 
thrift  enabled  the  introduction  of  the  bread-ticket  with- 
out marked  disturbance  to  normal  German  life,  so  the 
nation  resorted  willingly  and  easily  to  all  the  other  new 
conditions  which  war  imposed.  A  people  goose- 
stepped  and  policed  from  the  nursery  to  the  grave, 
bred  in  docility,  with  wills  of  their  own  eternally 
broken  before  they  have  left  the  Kinderstube,  with 
initiative  and  self-reliance  knocked  out  of  them  with 
the  rod  at  home  and  in  school,  and  with  blind  unyield- 
ing subordination  to  discipline  literally  pounded  into 
their  bones  in  barracks,  provides  no  astonishing  spec- 
tacle in  making  war,  when  war  comes,  as  one  man 
obeying  one  supreme  will.  War  is  the  ultima  ratio, 
indeed,  which  this  national  system  of  self -suppression 
has  in  mind.  The  surprising  thing  is  not  that  the 
world  has  witnessed  so  colossal  an  exhibition  of 
team-work  in  Germany.  The  unexpected  would  have 
been  if  Germany  had  given  any  other  account  of  her- 
self. When  we  speak,  as  we  all  do,  and  especially  the 
English,  of  "Germany's  years  of  preparation,"  we 
should  eliminate  the  notion  that  these  preparations 
were  confined  to  shells,  guns,  fortifications,  battleships 
and  legions.  No  single  other  "preparation"  of  the  Ger- 
man war  gods  measured  up,  in  my  judgment,  to  the 
unseen  and  unnoticed,  yet  all-engulfing,  decade-old,  na- 
tional scheme  of  molding  the  minds  of  men,  women, 


THE   EMPIRE   OF   HATE  329 

children  and  babes  along  the  line  of  unresisting,  com- 
plete slavery  to  Superiority,  uniformed  as  the  State. 
When  you  dilute  this  super-subjugation  with  the  wine 
of  true  patriotism  which,  despite  their  Socialism,  their 
police,  their  burdensome  taxes,  their  goose-step,  their 
powerless  parliaments  and  all  the  other  concomitants 
of  an  autocratic  monarchy,  flows  red  and  joyously 
through  the  soul  of  the  Germans,  you  secure  a  spiritual 
admixture  which  approaches  invincibility.  You  dis- 
cover the  ingredients  of  what  Lloyd-George  christened 
the  "potato-bread  spirit,"  which  he  truly  described  as  a 
greater  danger  for  Germany's  enemies  than  Hinden- 
burg's  strategy.  The  former  will  survive  long  after 
the  latter  has  broken  down. 

For  a  full  year,  interrupted  only  by  six  weeks  in  the 
United  States  at  the  end  of  the  winter  of  1914-15,  I 
have  kept  in  as  close  touch  with  Germany  in  war-time 
as  if  I  were  at  my  old  lookout  in  the  Friedrichstrasse. 
My  professional  task  in  London  all  that  time  has  been 
to  study  the  German  Press.  Day  in  and  day  out  I 
have  done  so.  I  have  read  the  Government-controlled 
Lokal-Anzeiger,  the  radical  Berliner  Tageblait,  the 
venerable  Vossische  Zeitung,  Count  Reventlow's  or- 
gan of  Fright  fulness,  the  Deutsche  Tageszeitung,  the 
Pan-German  Tdgliche  Rundschau,  the  Thunderer  of 
Prussian  conservatism,  the  Kreuz-Zeitung,  and  Maxi- 
milian Harden's  vitriolic  Zukunft.  The  voice  of  par- 
alyzed Hamburg  has  come  to  me  morning  and  night 
through  the  malevolent  Hamburger  Nachrichten  and 
Fremderiblatt.  Vorw'drts  has  kept  me  informed  of 
German  Socialism's  invertebrate  vagaries.  The 
cultured  Cologne   Gazette,   the  property  of   Doctor 


330  THE   ASSAULT 

Neven-Dumont,  whose  wife  is  half-English  and  whose 
son  is  proud  of  his  Oxford  degree,  and  yet  has  almost 
led  the  German  Press  in  the  violence  of  its  Anglo- 
phobism,  has  told  me  what  semi-official  Germany 
wanted  the  world  to  believe  was  its  views  from  hour 
to  hour.  In  the  Frankfurter  Zeitung  I  have  been  able 
to  glean  the  news  and  opinion  of  the  great  German 
financial  and  commercial  classes  for  which  it  speaks. 
Catholic  Bavaria,  the  land  of  Crown  Prince  "Rup- 
precht,  the  Bloody,"  has  been  interpreted  to  me  by  the 
Munich  Neueste  Nachrichten.  The  Dresdner  Anzeiger 
has  mirrored  Saxony  day  by  day.  And,  as  the  Stim- 
mung  of  no  country  in  the  world  is  so  faithfully  repro- 
duced by  its  comic  press  as  is  opinion  in  Germany,  my 
readings  have  been  amplified,  as  well  as  lightened,  by 
heartlessly  ironic  Simplicissimus,  artistic  Jugend,  Flie- 
gende  Blatter  and  Lustige  Blatter.  My  German  literary 
diet,  which  was  ruining  my  eye-sight,  has  been  almost 
more  opulent  than  when  in  Berlin,  has  finally  been  en- 
riched from  week  to  week  by  the  incessant  grist  of 
pamphlets  and  booklets  which  has  poured  from  the 
German  mill  even  in  more  copious  and  overwhelming 
measure  than  in  peace-times.  If  the  printed  word  is 
the  index  of  a  nation's  thought,  little  of  moment  in 
Germany  since  August,  1914,  has  escaped  me.  I  have 
had  the  inestimable  advantage  of  being  able  to  absorb 
it  in  the  light  of  its  relationship  to  the  situation  outside 
of  Germany — an  opportunity  of  which  the  Germans 
themselves,  though  I  would  not  try  to  make  them  be- 
lieve it,  have  been  cruelly  deprived. 

Telescopic  observation  of  Germany,  as  reflected  by 
its  press,  a  little  knowledge  of  what  Doctor  Minister- 


THE   EMPIRE   OF   HATE  331 

berg  would  call  the  Fatherland's  "psychology,"  and  the 
actual  deeds  of  the  German  army,  navy  and  Govern- 
ment have  provided  me,  I  think  I  may  make  so  bold 
as  to  say,  with  a  fairly  complete  and  accurate  pic- 
ture. Germany,  thus  visualized,  stands  out  to  me 
in  bold,  clear-cut  relief.  It  is  a  strange  and  ter- 
rible composite  of  forces  generally  considered  in- 
congruous and  mutually  destructive — Efficiency,  Malice 
and  Intolerance.  The  world  ought  to  have  known  that 
in  war  Germany  would  reveal  titanic  powers  of  scien- 
tific organization.  It  did  not  expect  to  find  her  an 
Empire  of  Hate.  It  hardly  imagined  that  the  land  of 
Goethe  and  Wagner,  Koch,  Behring  and  Ehrlich,  Sie- 
mens, Rathenau  and  Ballin,  Hauptmann,  Strauss  and 
Reinhardt,  Eucken,  Haeckel  and  Harnack,  could  be 
turned  even  by  the  devouring  blasts  of  war  into  a  com- 
munity capable  of  elevating  to  the  dignity  of  a  na- 
tional anthem  such  a  ferocious  song  as  Lissauer's 
Hymn  of  Hate  Against  England,  whose  soul  is  best 
breathed  by  its  closing  stanza : 

"Take  you  the  folk  of  the  Earth  in  pay, 
With  bars  of  gold  your  ramparts  lay, 
Bedeck  the  ocean  with  bow  on  bow, 
Ye  reckon  well,  but  not  well  enough  now. 
French  and  Russian,  they  matter  not, 
A  blow  for  a  blow,  a  shot  for  a  shot, 
We  fight  the  battle  with  bronze  and  steel, 
And  the  time  that  is  coming  Peace  will  seal. 
You  will  we  hate  with  a  lasting  hate, 
We  will  never  forego  our  hate, 
Hate  by  water  and  hate  by  land, 
Hate  of  the  head  and  hate  of  the  hand, 


332  THE   ASSAULT 

Hate  of  the  hammer  and  hate  of  the  crown, 
Hate  of  seventy  millions,  choking  down. 
We  love  as  one,  we  hate  as  one, 
We  have  one  foe,  and  one  alone — 
ENGLAND!" 

Even  Barbara  Henderson's  brilliant  translation  of 
this  epic  of  spleen,  the  first  version  of  which  to  be  pub- 
lished in  Great  Britain  it  was  my  privilege  to  reprint 
in  The  Daily  Mail  from  the  columns  of  the  New  York 
Times,  fails  to  do  justice  to  the  innate  rancor  and  gall 
of  Lissauer's  original  verses.  Americans  who  visited 
Germany  during  the  war  were  unanimous  in  agreeing 
that  no  rendering  of  the  Hymn  of  Hate  in  English 
could  possibly  interpret  its  consuming  spirit.  You  had 
to  hear  it  rasped  with  the  ferocity  of  snarling,  guttural 
German,  they  would  say,  to  gain  even  an  approximate 
idea  of  its  power.  You  had  to  watch  a  man  or  woman 
recitationist  or  singer,  for  it  was  set  to  music,  too, 
bawl  it  out,  in  a  crescendo  of  passionate  fury  as  the 
final  word  of  each  stanza,  England!  was  reached.  You 
had  to  sit  in  the  midst  of  a  theater,  cafe  or  music-hall 
audience,  or  even  in  a  drawing-room,  and  note  all 
around  you  the  frenzied  countenances,  the  clenched 
fists,  the  whole  enraged  being,  of  men,  women  and 
children,  to  know  how  Lissauer's  ballad  of  gall  had 
burnt  itself  into  a  people's  soul.  There  have  been 
more  or  less  sincere  efforts  in  Germany  to  banish  the 
Hymn  of  Hate.  Lissauer  having  previously  re- 
ceived the  Iron  Cross  for  poetic  gallantry,  and  from 
the  pulpit  and  the  school  rostrum  the  unrighteousness 
of  hate  had  been  sanctimoniously  proclaimed.  But 
Lissauer  only  put  into  verse  the  spirit  which  mad- 


THE    EMPIRE    OF    HATE  333 

dened  Berlin  on  the  night  of  August  4,  1914,  which 
grew  in  intensity  as  the  magnitude  of  British  inter- 
vention in  the  war  slowly  dawned,  and  which,  surface 
manifestations  to  the  contrary  notwithstanding,  lin- 
gers deep  and  ineffaceable  in  the  German  breast,  and 
will  remain  there,  barring  a  miracle,  for  generations 
after  the  war  is  over. 

While  the  Hymn  of  Hate  was  at  the  zenith  of  its 
glory,  some  genius  whose  name,  unfortunately,  will  be 
lost  to  posterity,  invented  Gott  strafe  England!  (God 
punish  England)  as  the  most  patriotic  form  of  greet- 
ing which  one  German  could  exchange  with  another. 
Friends  meeting  in  the  suburban  trains  or  street-cars, 
or  in  the  streets,  no  longer  lifted  their  hats  as  usual 
and  said  Guten  Morgen.  They  shook  hands  solemnly 
and  exclaimed  Gott  strafe  England!  When  they 
parted  at  night,  it  was  not  Guten  Abend,  but  Gott  strafe 
England!  Then  they  began  stamping  it — with  a  rub- 
ber-stamp which  was  sold  by  the  thousand  for  the  pur- 
pose— on  their  letters  to  correspondents  at  home  and 
abroad.  It  was  even  adopted,  now  and  then,  as  an 
epitaph  for  a  fallen  soldier,  whose  relatives  would  end 
up  the  customary  obituary  in  the  advertising  columns 
of  the  newspapers  with  Gott  strafe  England.  Now 
postcards  blossomed  forth  with  the  new  national  motto. 
Scarf-pins  made  their  appearance  in  the  windows  of 
cheap-jewelry  stores,  inscribed  Gott  strafe  England! 
The  legend  was  reproduced  in  a  score  of  different  de- 
signs on  cuff-links,  brooches,  and  even  wedding-rings, 
while  hardly  a  schoolchild  was  without  a  badge  or  but- 
ton emblazoned  with  the  Fatherland's  holiest  war 
prayer.  Handkerchiefs  were  embroidered  with  it, 
pocket-knives  had  it  enameled  on  their  handles,  and 


334  THE   ASSAULT 

many  a  Liebesgabe  to  a  dear  one  in  the  trenches  went 
forth  with  a  pair  of  black- white-red  braces  imprinted 
Gott  strafe  England!  On  a  medal  which  doubtless 
decorated  thousands  of  German  breasts — a  sample 
reached  England — was  engraved: 

"Give  us  this  day  our  daily  bread;  England 
would  take  it  from  us.     God  punish  her!" 

Crown  Prince  (Rupprecht  of  Bavaria,  who  was 
beaten  by  Sir  John  French's  "contemptible  little  army" 
at  Neuve  Chapelle  and  Artois,  placed  Royal  approval 
on  the  Gott  strafe  England  cult  in  his  notorious  battle- 
order  in  the  winter  campaign  to  "annihilate  the  Brit- 
ish arch- foe  in  front  of  us  at  any  and  all  cost." 

Englishmen,  and  especially  English  soldiers,  perhaps 
measured  the  Gott  strafe  England  sentiment  at  be- 
low its  real  value  as  a  German  fighting  asset  when  they 
decided  to  treat  it  as  a  joke.  That  was  the  spirit,  at 
any  rate,  which  animated  a  group  of  young  Eton  men 
at  the  front,  who  sent  a  postcard  to  the  Headmaster  of 
their  historic  school  rival  reading :  Gott  strafe  Harrow! 
And  on  April  Fool's  day  British  Tommies  across  a 
certain  meadow  of  death  in  Flanders  expelled  from  a 
mine-thrower  something  which  looked  murderously 
like  a  bomb.  When  it  bounced  in  front  of  the  Ger- 
man lines,  and  bounced  again,  without  exploding,  a 
"Boche"  ventured  out  of  the  trenches  and  picked  it 
up.  He  found  it  was  a  football,  and  on  it  was  in- 
scribed : 

April  Fool ! 
Gott  strafe  England! 


THE    EMPIRE   OF   HATE 


335 


336  THE   ASSAULT 

Mr.  Punch  and  his  lesser  confreres  in  British  hu- 
mor have  almost  lived  through  the  war  on  Gott  strafe 
England!  The  sentiment  has  not  struck  terror  into 
John  Bull's  heart,  but  it  has  very  materially  added  to 
his  war-time  gaiety. 

Next  to  the  Hate  epidemic,  the  mystifying  account 
of  themselves  which  the  German  Social  Democrats 
have  given  during  the  war  stands  out  as  the  main  phe- 
nomenon. I  have  asked  myself  more  than  once  what 
might  have  been  if  Bebel,  the  brains,  or  Singer,  the 
fists,  of  the  old-time  Socialistic  movement  had 
been  alive  in  August,  1914.  Certainly  the  utter 
failure  of  the  Socialists  to  hamper  the  operation  of  the 
German  war-machine  will  remain  forever  one  of  the 
amazing  episodes  of  the  war.  It  will  rank,  of  course, 
also,  as  one  of  the  blazing  miscalculations  of  the 
Fatherland's  enemies.  It  is  true  that  Bebel,  the  long- 
time autocrat  of  the  German  "Reds,"  proclaimed  often 
enough  that  when  Germany  was  in  peril,  he  and  his 
Genossen  would  shoulder  the  musket  with  a  will.  Yet 
the  suspicion  always  lurked  that  when  the  German 
War  Party's  time  came  and  it  essayed  to  drag  the  Ger- 
man people  across  the  Rubicon,  the  Social  Democracy, 
with  4,250,000  voters,  111  members  of  parliament  and 
German  trades-unionism  almost  solidly  behind  it,  would 
be  found  standing  like  an  insuperable  barrier  against 
the  powers  of  aggression.  There  had  been  more  than 
one  hint  that  working-class  Germany,  in  that  hour, 
would  not  shrink  from  utilizing  the  potent  weapon  of 
the  General  Strike  to  stay  the  hand  of  the  war  zealots. 
Opinion  on  that  score  amounted  to  almost  positive  con- 
viction in  non-Socialistic  Germany  and  throughout  Eu- 
rope, in  case  the  test  were  to  be  forced  by  a.  German, 


THE   EMPIRE   OF   HATE  337 

war  of  manifestly  provocative  character.  It  therefore 
was  of  prime  importance  to  the  clique  which  engineered 
the  war  that  the  Social  Democracy  be  made  to  believe, 
forthwith  and  implicitly,  that  the  impending  conflict 
was  a  "defensive  war,"  to  which  Socialist  leaders 
had  always  pledged  the  proletariat's  unswerving  sup- 
port. Categorical  and  lachrymose  assurances  to  that 
effect  were  accordingly  given  to  the  Social  Democratic 
group  of  the  Reichstag  by  the  Imperial  Chancellor  in 
the  confidential  conferences  with  the  parties,  which 
preceded  the  public  session  of  the  House  on  August  4, 
1914.  The  once-despised  "Reds,"  so  often  denounced 
by  William  II  as  "men  without  a  country,"  but  whose 
votes  in  the  national  legislature  were  now  so  essential 
to  the  show  of  Imperial  unity  with  which  Germany 
desired  to  go  to  war,  were  supplied  with  ample  "evi- 
dence" that  Germany's  cause  was  "just."  She  had 
been  "fallen  upon"  by  ruthless,  envious  enemies,  the 
struggle  about  to  begin  would  be  waged  by  the  Father- 
land in  "defense"  of  its  holiest  national  interests,  and 
the  support  of  all  classes  was  essential  to  the  waging 
of  the  fight  with  which  nothing  short  of  "the  Em- 
pire's existence''  was  bound  up.  The  Socialists 
listened,  patriotically,  to  this  siren  song.  They 
believed  its  tale  of  woe.  They  bade  the  Chan- 
cellor to  be  assured  that  they  would  not  be  found  want- 
ing in  Germany's  moment  of  peril.  And  a  few  hours 
later  Herr  Haase,  the  chairman  of  the  party,  was  on 
his  feet  in  the  Reichstag,  uttering  glittering  platitudes 
about  Socialism's  constitutional  abhorrence  of  war 
and  all  its  works,  but  proclaiming  that  the  party's  full 
strength  and  support  were  at  the  Government's  dis- 
posal for  the  purpose  of  repelling  the  invader!    Sic 


338  THE  ASSAULT 

transit  gloria  mundi!  August  Bebel  might  well  have 
remarked,  could  his  shade  have  hovered  over  this  ab- 
ject surrender  to  Mars  by  his  supine  heirs  of  the  fun- 
damental principles  to  which  he  had  consecrated  a  life- 
time. 

From  that  moment  forth  the  Kaiser  needed  to  give 
himself  no  concern  as  to  "the  internal  foe,"  the  nick- 
name of  reproach  always  saddled  on  the  Social  De- 
mocracy by  the  Military  Autocracy.  The  wing-clipped 
"Reds"  were  even  allowed  a  certain  latitude  of  free 
speech  and  thought  about  the  war.  They  were  per- 
mitted to  indulge  in  their  favorite  academic  discussions 
about  the  propriety  of  Socialist  votes  for  war  credits, 
and  even  Haase  himself,  having  gradually  come  to 
realize  that  the  Kaiser  and  Bethmann  Hollweg  had  sold 
the  Social  Democracy  a  political  gold  brick,  was  not 
locked  up  for  sedition  for  issuing,  together  with  two 
fellow-leaders,  Bernstein  and  Kautsky,  a  courageous 
manifesto  against  support  of  limitless  war  grants.  Vor- 
w'drts,  the  Socialist  organ,  and  other  party  newspapers 
were  from  time  to  time  suppressed  by  the  military  cen- 
sor for  airing  war  opinions  too  freely,  but  as  successive 
war  measures  were  presented  for  the  approval  of  the 
Reichstag,  a  safe  majority  of  Socialist  votes  was  on 
each  occasion  cast  in  their  favor.  The  myth  of  a  "war 
of  defense"  was  never  broken  down.  The  King  of  Ba- 
varia and  the  National  Liberal  Party  gave  the  game 
away  during  the  spring  and  summer  of  1915,  by  blus- 
tering about  the  necessity  for  sweeping  "rectifications 
of  our  frontiers,"  or,  in  other  words,  wholesale  an- 
nexation of  conquered  territory,  but  Germany's  war 
was  well  into  its  second  year  finding  the  Social  De- 
mocracy, for  the  purposes  and  needs  of  the  Govern- 


THE   EMPIRE   OF   HATE  339 

ment  at  least,  entirely  harmless.  Food  shortage  and 
high  prices  churned  proletariat  Germany  into  growing 
discontent,  as  the  war  proceeded.  Butter  and  meat 
riots  have  occurred  in  Berlin,  and  there  have  been 
ominous  suggestions  that  the  military  authorities  are 
alive  to  the  possibility  of  "revolutionary"  manifesta- 
tions. But  the  day  of  Germany's  Commune  is  not  yet. 
No  better  evidence  of  the  completeness  with  which 
the  Socialist  party  was  hypnotized  from  the  outset 
could  have  been  supplied  than  by  the  action  of  Doctor 
Ludwig  Frank,  one  of  its  brilliant  young  leaders,  in 
volunteering  for  military  service.  Frank  fell  in  the 
earliest  fighting  in  France,  in  August,  1914,  and  now 
fills  a  hero's  grave.  A  Jewish  lawyer  in  Baden,  he 
was  commonly  looked  upon  as  the  future  chieftain  of 
Social  Democracy.  The  war  interfered  with  a  cher- 
ished plan  of  his — to  visit  and  lecture  in  the  United 
States — and  I  suppose  the  last  interview  he  ever  gave 
was  one  I  had  with  him,  in  which  he  spoke  with  en- 
thusiasm of  the  American  impressions  he  hoped  to 
gather.  He  was  keenly  interested  in  the  corporation 
problem,  recognized  that  it  contained  evils  with  which 
Germany  before  long  would  have  to  cope,  and  wanted 
to  equip  himself  with  first-hand  knowledge  of  its  rami- 
fications in  the  home  of  its  highest  development.  Frank 
was  not  a  fire-eating  German  Social  Democrat.  He 
belonged  to  the  moderate  or  "revisionist"  wing  of  the 
party.  He  was  obsessed  with  no  illusions  as  to  the  fu- 
ture possibilities  of  Socialism  in  Germany  and  ac- 
knowledged that  sane  democrats  had  long  since  aban- 
doned hope  of  accomplishing  anything  more  than  the 
establishment  of  a  truly  constitutional  monarchy  and 
Parliamentary  government.     It  is  a  thousand  pities 


340  THE   ASSAULT 

that  Ludwig  Frank  has  not  been  spared  to  play  his 
capable  part  in  the  political  reconstruction  of  Germany 
which,  win  or  lose,  is  almost  inevitably  certain  to  fol- 
low the  war.  Doctor  Karl  Liebknecht,  that  stormy 
petrel  of  German  Socialism,  remained  the  one  man  to 
utter  anti-war  sentiment  day  in  and  day  out.  Even 
the  Government's  action  in  sticking  him  into  field-gray 
and  dispatching  him  to  the  front  for  intermittent  serv- 
ice failed  to  check  the  flow  of  his  invective.  Liebknecht 
represents  the  Imperial  borough  of  Potsdam,  of  all 
places  in  the  world,  in  the  German  Parliament,  but, 
though  he  has  talked  incessantly  and  voted  rebelliously, 
the  voice  of  the  representative  of  the  Kaiser's  con- 
gressional district  was  destined  to  remain  as  one  cry- 
ing in  the  wilderness. 

I  have  said  that  the  triumphs  of  Germany  behind  the 
firing-line — the  fortitude  with  which  she  has  borne  her 
hideous  losses  in  life,  the  magnificently  effective  dem- 
onstration of  unity,  economy,  self-sacrifice,  industrial 
and  financial  organization,  and  adaptability  to  all  the 
domestic  conditions  of  war — were  only  things  which 
those  of  us  who  knew  the  Germans  expected  to  come 
to  pass.  They  were  as  inevitable,  in  their  paternalized 
State,  the  Empire  of  System,  as  were  the  early 
cannon-ball  successes  of  the  German  army.  We  who 
were  aware,  as  eye-witnesses,  of  Germany's  prodigious 
preparations  for  "the  Day,"  never  doubted  that,  having 
chosen  her  own  moment  for  launching  her  thun- 
derbolts, they  would  accomplish  precisely  the  stagger- 
ing blows  and  strangle-holds  which  August  and 
September,  1914,  brought  forth.  Although  (including 
myself)  there  was  not  one  man  in  ten  thousand  in  Ber- 
lin who  knew  who  Hindenburg  was — I  have  merely 


THE    EMPIRE    OF   HATE  341 

a  faint  recollection  of  having  once  read  his  name  as 
an  army  commander  in  Kaiser  Maneuvers — a  good 
many  of  us  had  an  abiding  impression  that  the  Rus- 
sian army  was  no  match  for  the  German  war  ma- 
chine, however  easily  the  Czar  might  roll  up  the 
Austrians.  The  victories  of  the  German  armies  in  the 
war  are  no  surprise  to  the  German  people.  They  have 
been  raised  in  the  belief  that  their  military  power  was 
invincible,  even  against  a  world  of  foes.  Events  in 
the  first  year  and  a  half  of  the  war,  even  though 
Paris  and  Calais  remained  untaken,  were  certainly  such 
as  to  convince  Germans  that  their  traditional  and 
child-like  confidence  in  their  armed  prowess  was  jus- 
tified. 

But  in  addition  to  Hate  and  Socialist  impotence, 
two  things  which  astounded  those  who  knew  and  ad- 
mired the  German  people,  were  their  callousness  to- 
ward the  deeds  which  have  been  committed  by  their 
army  and  navy  and  their  savage  intolerance  of  any 
other  point  of  view  except  their  own.  I  am  not  one 
of  those  who  believe  that  all  Germans  have  cloven 
hoofs.  Bitterly  as  I  oppose  their  cause  in  this  war 
and  fully  as  I  hold  their  War  Party  responsible  for 
the  war,  I  am  not  prepared  to  believe  that  the  Ger- 
mans are  either  a  decadent  or  a  lost  race.  What  I 
do  believe  is  that  the  war  has,  temporarily  at  least, 
annihilated  the  moral  qualities  of  the  Germans  and 
dragged  them  from  the  high  estate  of  ethical  and  dis- 
criminating intelligence  in  which  they  lived  in  ante- 
bellum times.  The  Germans  of  Louvain,  of  the  Lusi- 
tania,  asphyxiating  gas,  liquid  fire,  submarine  piracy, 
airship  assassination  and  General  Fright  fulness  are  not 
the  Germans  among  whom  I  spent  thirteen  happy, 


542  THE   ASSAULT 

fruitful  years.  They  are  not  the  Germans  whose  main 
concern,  as  it  is  that  of  the  average  run  of  men  and 
women  in  other  climes,  was  to  prosper,  raise  families, 
educate  children,  live  comfortably,  acquire  a  compe- 
tence and  enjoy  life  generally.  These  Germans  no 
longer  exist.  They  have  been  succeeded  by  a  race  of 
war-maddened  Germans,  who  were  told  by  their  Im- 
perial Chancellor  that  "necessity  knows  no  law,"  that 
treaties  are  "scraps  of  paper,"  and  who  have  been 
made  to  believe  that,  in  war,  there  is  but  one  thing  to 
do — "to  hack  our  way  through" — and  that,  as  Bis- 
marck and  the  German  War  Book  said,  the  enemy  must 
be  left  with  nothing  except  eyes  to  weep  with.  The 
Germans  have  been  steeped  in  all  this  by  their  over- 
lords, living  and  dead,  and,  being  children  of  dis- 
cipline, they  have  looked  with  unmoistened  eye  upon 
all  and  sundry  done  in  the  holy  name  of  these  bedrock 
German  principles. 

The  Fatherland's  heartlessness  toward  such  events 
as  the  rape  of  Belgium  becomes  less  inexplicable  when 
one  recalls  the  cult  of  brutality  which  pursues  the  Ger- 
man from  the  nursery  upward.  As  a  child  in  swad- 
dling clothes,  he  is  taught  that  he  has  no  right  to  a 
will  of  his  own,  and  if  he  attempts  to  cultivate  one,  it 
is  promptly  beaten  out  of  him.  I  recall,  with  more 
amusement  than  the  episode  inspired  in  me  at  the  time, 
the  struggle  we  had  with  our  beloved  family  physician 
in  Berlin,  Doctor  Keiler,  to  allow  us  to  bring  up  our 
three  or  four-year-old  son  as  a  boy  and  not  as  a  ma- 
chine. "Das  Kind  darf  keinen  Will  en  haben!"  I  re- 
member dear  old  Keiler  shrieking  in  Wilmersdorf 
more  than  once,  as  he  labored  in  vain  to  convince  us 
that  if  Frightfulness  was  necessary  to  break  the  young- 


THE   EMPIRE   OF   HATE  343 

ster's  inborn  initiative  and  self-reliance,  we  must  not 
shrink  from  resorting  to  it.  And  when  the  German 
escapes  the  Kinderstube  with  its  unfailing  rod  and  en- 
ters Gymnasium,  he  is  once  more  under  the  cruel  lash 
of  Efficiency,  which  drives  scores  of  lads  to  suicide  at 
each  recurring  Easter-time  because  they  have  failed  in 
examinations  for  the  higher  grade,  notwithstanding  a 
term's  unceasing  hounding  by  their  drill-sergeant  of  a 
teacher  and  class-room  and  home  cramming  which 
have  kept  his  frame  thin  and  his  cheek  pallid.  A  whole 
literature  has  come  into  existence  in  opposition  to  the 
intellectual  brutality  to  which  German  schoolboys  be- 
tween the  ages  of  eight  and  sixteen  are  subjected,  but 
the  consensus  of  opinion  is  that  the  system's  advan- 
tages outweigh  its  deficiencies,  and  that  youthful  sui- 
cides are  part  of  the  price  the  Fatherland  must  pay  for 
what  Professor  Lasson  of  Berlin  calls  its  "cultural 
superiority"  over  the  rest  of  mankind. 

Thrashed  in  the  nursery,  tormented  in  school,  the 
German  lad  must  then  face  a  period  of  bullying  in  bar- 
racks, for,  if  he  has  managed  to  survive  his  Gymnasia 
years  in  health,  he  will  enter  the  army.  It  is  not  nec- 
essary in  this  narrative  to  dilate  upon  the  cruelties  com- 
mitted in  German  barracks  in  the  sacrosanct  name  of 
Discipline  and  Thoroughness.  There  is  a  literature  in 
Germany  on  that  subject,  too,  and  the  penal  records  of 
the  military  and  civil  courts  comprise  the  bulk  of  it.  It 
is  only  with  the  lesson  of  the  system  with  which  we 
need  to  concern  ourselves  here;  and  that  is,  that  the 
German  man  who  emerges  from  the  army  comes  out 
with  notions  about  the  efficacy  and  justifiability  of 
brute  force  and  brutality  which  are  certain,  under  the 
red  license  which  war  confers,  to  find  expression  in 


344  THE   ASSAULT 

terrible  deeds.  In  other  words,  a  German  who  has  him- 
self perhaps  been  assaulted  by  his  regimental  sergeant 
on  scores  of  occasions  (such  cases  are  plentiful),  who 
has  seen  the  bloody  saber-duel  elevated  in  his  uni- 
versity days  to  the  level  of  the  manliest  art,  who  has 
throughout  his  life  been  a  supine  victim  of  police  vio- 
lence, who  holds  womankind  in  semi-contempt,  who 
thinks  it  sportsmanlike  to  shoot  birds  alight,  who  re- 
joices in  his  prowess  as  a  slaughterer  of  wild  game, 
who  beats  his  horses,  who  is  as  unfamiliar  with  the 
ethics  of  sport  and  play  as  he  is  with  the  lingo  of  a 
Choctaw  dialect — such  a  man,  I  say,  is  bound,  when  he 
is  sent  forth  with  his  Kaiser's  mandate  to  "hack  his 
way  through,"  to  stagger  humanity  as  the  Germans 
have  never  ceased  to  stagger  it  on  land,  on  sea  and 
in  the  air  since  August,  1914.  Given  a  nation  of 
non-combatants  who  have  been  instructed  to  believe 
that  these  things  must  be  because  otherwise  their  ex- 
istence will  be  imperiled,  and  you  have  to  do  with 
a  community  which,  however  delightful  its  qualities 
as  individuals,  is  no  longer  capable  of  measuring  right 
and  wrong,  by  normal  standards  and  which  is  ready 
to  tolerate  any  and  everything,  as  long  as  it  is  part 
and  parcel  of  the  general  scheme  to  "preserve  the 
Fatherland."  If  one  considers  all  these  things,  which 
I  set  down  in  no  spirit  of  venom,  but  purely  in  an  at- 
tempt to  diagnose  German  war  callousness,  one  will 
begin  to  be  able  to  understand  why  German  sensibili- 
ties remain  unshocked  in  the  presence  of  things  which 
have  horrified  civilization.  One's  understanding  will 
be  complete  if  it  is  remembered  that  not  one  in  a  mil- 
lion Germans  believes  that  these  things  have  happened 
at  all ! 


THE    EMPIRE    OF   HATE  345 

Philosophy,  logic,  metaphysics  and  psychology  are 
cultivated  sciences  in  Germany.  It  is  even  sometimes 
claimed — in  Berlin  and  in  certain  regions  of  Harvard 
— that  they  were  "made  in  Germany."  Yet  as  applied 
sciences  they  have  given  a  woefully  sorry  exhibition 
of  themselves  in  the  Fatherland  during  the  war.  They 
have,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  entirely  disappeared.  They 
have  been  supplanted  by  a  new  doctrine,  for  which  the 
Germans  themselves  have  an  old  and  incomparable 
word — Rechthaberei.  I  learned  that  precious  term 
from  an  American  colleague  in  Berlin,  a  South  Caro- 
linian and  profound  student  of  German  character 
named  William  C.  Dreher.  Dreher,  who  is  an  able 
journalist  specializing  in  economics,  has  held  forth  to 
me  on  countless  occasions  about  "Prussian  Rechtha- 
berei"— the  unquenchable  conviction  of  the  average 
Teuton  that  he  not  only  is  "right"  about  everything, 
but  that  everybody  else  whom  he  permits  to  have  a 
thought  or  a  word  on  the  same  subject  is  essentially, 
inherently  and  incorrigibly  "wrong."  I  can  hardly 
credit  the  report  that  Dreher  himself  has  fallen  a  vic- 
tim to  the  insidious  influence  of  Rechthaberei.  It  is 
something  that  presupposes  omniscience  and  mental 
aristocracy  on  the  part  of  the  propounder  of  a 
given  theory,  and  senility  or  utterly  misguided  stub- 
bornness on  the  part  of  the  opponent.  Germany  has 
wallowed  in  Rechthaberei  since  August  1,  1914.  It 
has  sucked  into  the  mire  of  intolerance  everybody  who 
has  dared  to  cherish  a  contrary  view.  It  has  refused 
the  right  of  independence  of  thought  to  every  living 
soul,  unless  that  thought  is  pro-German.  It  has  swal- 
lowed whole  anything  the  German  Government  and  its 
muzzled  press  have  said,  and  it  has  condemned  as  crim- 


346  THE   ASSAULT 

inal  falsehood  anything  published  in  enemy  countries. 
It  allows  British,  French  and  Russian  newspapers,  in 
a  lordly  way,  to  circulate  freely  in  Germany,  as  of 
yore,  thumping  its  chest  and  saying  "We  are  not  afraid 
of  the  truth" — but  only  after  having  drilled  the  coun- 
try into  believing  that  nothing  printed  abroad  about 
the  war  is  or  can  be  true !  So  the  German  who  finds 
The  Daily  Mail  or  the  New  York  Times  on  its  accus- 
tomed file  at  his  favorite  cafe,  just  as  he  used  to  do  in 
peace  days,  knows  in  advance  that  he  is  to  read  "lies," 
and  he  digests  them,  leaving  his  patriotism  unpolluted. 

"Mass-suggestion"  has  thus  worked  wonders  in 
War  Germany.  It  has  driven  me  for  example — I  hope 
not  forever — from  the  ranks  of  my  oldest  and  best 
friends  in  Germany — Americans,  as  well  as  Germans. 
It  impelled  my  wife's  dearest  friend,  the  Philadelphia- 
born  wife  of  a  German,  to  write  a  letter  early  in  the 
war,  formally  "canceling"  the  friendship,  because 
"your  husband,  instead  of  choosing  to  identify  himself 
with  an  honest  cause,  has  thrown  in  his  lot  with  Eng- 
land, and,  with  her,  will  share  the  downfall  toward 
which  that  nation  is  headed."  That  would  be  funny,  if 
it  were  not  so  tragically  pathetic.  I  hear  that  a  great 
many  good  people  in  Berlin,  wasting  upon  me  breath 
and  choleric  energy  which  deserved  to  be  spent  on  a  far 
worthier  object,  fairly  splutter  when  they  hear  or  read 
my  name.  I  have  been  the  target  of  absurd  and  filthy 
personal  abuse  in  the  German  press.  I  have  won  un- 
dying execration,  for  I  have  dared,  in  a  most  un- 
German  way,  to  have  a  view  of  my  own  on  the  question 
which  is  agitating  men's  minds  and  searching  their 
hearts  as  never  was  done  before. 

Yet  all  the  millstones  of  hate  and  intolerance  are  not 


THE    EMPIRE    OF   HATE  347 

preventing  the  Germans  from  conducting  a  fight  which 
challenges,  in  its  efficiency,  barring  its  inhuman  aspects, 
the  admiration  of  foe  and  neutral  the  world  over. 
They  are,  indeed,  a  nation  in  arms.  Their  Spar- 
tan qualities  behind  the  front,  their  contempt  of 
death  in  the  enemy's  fire,  will  not  easily  be  conquered. 
Exhaustion,  economic  and  human,  must  tell  against 
them  in  the  long  run,  though  the  process  of  attrition 
will  be  vastly  slower,  I  fancy,  than  armchair  war  crit- 
ics in  England  think.  The  Germans  will  fight  to  the 
last  man  and  the  last  pfennig,  as  I  know  them,  and 
when  they  are  beaten,  they  will  furl  their  tattered 
standards  after  a  combat  which,  stripped  of  its  horrors, 
will  yet  have  been  marked  by  deeds  of  patriotism, 
courage  and  glory  fit  to  take  their  place  alongside  the 
heroic  traditions  of  mankind. 


CHAPTER  XXI 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND 


ROME  was  not  built  in  a  day,  but  England  has 
been  made  over  in  a  year.  Personal  liberty  is 
gone.  A  free  press  no  longer  exists.  Extravagance 
is  "bad  form."  Economy  has  become  respectable. 
Dukes'  sons  and  cooks'  sons  are  "pals."  Drunkenness 
is  disappearing.  Conscription  looms  on  the  horizon. 
The  Irish  are  loyal.  Suffragettes  are  making  shells 
and  bandaging  wounds  instead  of  smashing  windows 
and  going  to  jail.  Pride  is  humbled,  though  not 
crushed.  Still  ringed  by  Kipling's  "leaden  seas," 
Britain  is  no  longer  an  island,  for  Zeppelins  have 
maimed  and  killed  and  wrecked  in  the  heart  of  Lon- 
don. Tolerance  is  a  lost  art.  British  have  learned  to 
hate.  The  link-boy  has  come  back  into  his  own;  the 
streets  at  night,  that  Admiral  Sir  Percy  Scott,  de- 
fender of  London  by  air,  may  blind  the  "sky-Huns," 
recall  the  gloom  of  the  Cimmerian  Regency.  Though 
Waterloo  was  won  a  hundred  years  ago,  a  terror 
worse  than  the  Napoleonic  scourge  has  overtaken 
the  descendants  of  Nelson  and  Wellington.  Britannia 
rules  the  waves,  but  the  blood  of  a  half  million  of  her 
best  sons  fertilizes  the  soil  of  France,  Belgium,  Turkey, 
Serbia  and  Africa;  and  the  flow  is  far  from  checked. 
The  "shopkeeper  of  the  world"  has  become  a  nation  in 
arms.    Only  one  phase  of  its  multifarious  life,  immuta- 

348 


THE    NEW    ENGLAND  349 

ble  as  the  sphinx,  has  survived  the  crucible  of  war  in 
pristine  glory — British  calm.  Ships  may  sink,  men 
may  fall,  bombs  may  annihilate  and  treasure  be  sapped, 
but  British  imperturbability,  like  Time  itself,  pursues 
the  even  tenor  of  its  way,  Himalayan  in  its  impervious- 
ness. 

Assuredly  it  has  been  for  no  lack  of  cause  that  Eng- 
land has  ridden  the  sea  of  Armageddon  without  cap- 
sizing. Squalls,  typhoons,  storms  and  barometric  dis- 
turbances of  every  form  of  violence  have  beset  her 
from  the  outset  of  the  voyage.  But  though  there  has 
been  tempest,  there  is  no  shipwreck.  She  enters  upon 
another  lap  of  a  seemingly  endless  journey,  battered 
indeed,  but  keel  down  and  full  steam  ahead.  It  is  still 
night.  Stokers  and  crew,  nor  even  the  captains  and 
commodores,  are  not  a  completely  united  band,  but 
their  differences  concern  only  the  methods  of  cleaving 
through  darkness  to  the  port,  to  gain  which,  at  any 
cost,  all  are  grimly  determined.  Failure  to  reach 
the  waters  of  their  desire  as  soon  as  the  Unthinking 
majority  hoped  and  believed  would  be  possible  has 
sobered  the  vision  and  intensified  the  resolve  of  crew 
and  commanders  alike.  It  has  not  reconciled  their 
antagonisms,  but  it  is  making  surer  than  ever  that  they 
will  land  their  craft  in  the  appointed  harbor,  though 
the  damnations  of  all  the  powers  of  destruction  are 
buffeted  against  her  in  the  attempt. 

My  name  for  Armageddon  is  the  War  of  Miscalcu- 
lations, for  it  is  a  title  which  indicts  every  belligerent 
without  exception.  The  Germans  expected  their 
army  to  be  in  Paris  by  the  end  of  September,  1914. 
The  English  and  the  French  reckoned  that  Russian 
Cossacks    would    be    hacking    souvenirs    from    the 


350  THE   ASSAULT 

sepulchral  statues  in  the  Berlin  Sieges-Allee  about 
the  same  time.  The  British  thought  that  Jellicoe 
would  starve  the  Germans.  Von  Tirpitz  imagined 
that  U-boats  would  paralyze  Britain's  life-line.  The 
British  pounded  vainly  at  the  Dardanelles  for  nine 
months,  and  when  they  couldn't  get  Calais  the  Ger- 
mans started  out  to  crush  Serbia.  Sir  Edward  Grey 
thought  Bulgaria  and  Greece  were  only  waiting  like 
ripe  fruit  to  drop  into  the  Allies'  lap  and  cry  for 
marching  orders.  He  was  about  as  near  right  as 
the  German  political  professors  who  always  assured 
William  II  that  India,  Egypt,  Canada,  South  Africa 
and  Australia  were  itching  to  revolt  when  the  Mother- 
land was  immersed  in  a  vast  European  war.  The  great 
war  has  been  a  rude  awakening  for  all  concerned.  In 
addition  to  killing  its  millions  of  men  and  squandering 
its  billions  of  money,  it  has  annihilated  theories,  ex- 
pectations, plans  and  aspirations  so  cruelly  that  the 
"war  expert"  has  become  a  deathless  laughing-stock. 
If  "experts"  have  learned  anything  from  the  war,  they 
will  henceforth  prefer  history  to  prophecy. 

"Business  as  Usual" — life  generally  in  the  old  rut, 
in  other  words — was  adopted  by  Britons  as  their  war 
motto.  Truly  did  a  politician  of  renown  exclaim 
a  year  later  that  no  unhappier,  because  no  more 
unfortunate,  maxim  was  ever  foisted  upon  or  ac- 
cepted by  a  patriotic  people.  The  nation  made  no  in- 
considerable attempt  to  convert  "Business  as  Usual" 
from  an  aphorism  into  an  actuality.  Seven  or  eight 
months  of  unrealized  objectives  had  to  pass  over  Eng- 
lish men  and  women's  resolute  heads  before  they  be- 
gan even  to  doubt  the  efficacy  of  the  complacent  prin- 
ciple they  had  laid  down  for  themselves.    But  the  mills 


THE    NEW    ENGLAND  351 

of  Mars,  like  those  of  his  colleagues,  keep  on  grinding, 
and  England  was  to  learn  that,  while  invasion  had  not 
seared  her  soil  as  it  had  scotched  that  of  all  her  Euro- 
pean allies,  war  yet  had  terrors  capable  of  burning  into 
the  soul,  saddening  the  homes  and  despoiling  the 
pockets  of  even  an  unravished  land. 

I  fix  the  date  when  Great  Britain  began  to  face  the 
iron  logic  of  events  with  sterner  realization  and  to 
doubt  the  efficacy  of  "muddle"  for  purposes  of  war  as 
May,  1915.  In  the  two  preceding  months  there  had 
been  a  series  of  episodes  of  more  climacteric  magnitude 
than  was  apparent  at  the  moment  of  their  occurrence. 
In  March  Sir  John  French's  army  made  a  vigorous  at- 
tempt to  break  through  the  German  lines,  and  the 
much-heralded  "victory"  of  Neuve  Chapelle  resulted. 
Thousands  of  British  soldiers,  and  half  a  hundred 
Americans  fighting  in  the  Canadian  contingent,  died 
gallantly  in  an  action  which,  when  its  terrible  cost  was 
eventually  counted,  could  not  be  catalogued  as  any- 
thing but  a  glorious  failure.  In  April  two  affairs 
of  purely  German  origin  were  recorded,  each  predes- 
tined to  leave  a  deep  impress  on  the  British  public 
mind :  the  employment  of  poison  gas  by  the  enemy  in 
sanguinary  engagements  around  Ypres,  and  the 
flinging  of  thirty-nine  British  officers,  captives  in  Ger- 
many, into  felons'  cells  by  way  of  "reprisal"  for  the 
segregation  in  England  of  captured  German  subma- 
rine crews. 

Because  the  truth  about  Neuve  Chapelle  remained 
suppressed  for  many  weeks,  attention  was  bestowed  to 
an  overshadowing  degree  on  the  gas  and  officer-im- 
prisonment episodes.  Hitherto  the  universal  demand 
in  England  was  that,  no  matter  how  the  Germans 


552  THE   ASSAULT, 

waged  war,  Englishmen  must  continue  to  fight  "like 
gentlemen."    Suggestions  that  the  hour  had  long  since 
arrived  for  an  eye-for-an-eye  and    tooth- for-a-tooth 
warfare  were  rejected  in  almost  every  quarter  as  "un- 
English"  and,  therefore,  undebatable.     The  Kaiser's 
soldateska  might  rape,  pillage,  loot  and  murder,  but 
British  troops  must  battle  "in  the  old-fashioned  way" 
— with  clean  hands.    Tirpitz's  bluejackets  might  prac- 
tise the  tactics  of  pirates,  but  Britannia's  sailors  would 
continue  to  respect  the  high  traditions  of  their  calling. 
Men  went  so  far  as  to  asseverate  that  it  were  better 
that  Britain  should  be  beaten  than  win  by  "German 
methods."    Sir  Edward  Clarke,  the  leader  of  the  bar, 
protesting  against  Sir  Arthur  Conan  Doyle's  proposal 
that  Zeppelin  murders  could  only  be  checked  by  British 
air  reprisals  against  defenseless  German  communities, 
wrote  to  The  Times:    "It  may  be  our  misfortune  to  be 
defeated  in  this  war,  but  it  will  be  our  own  fault  if 
we   are    disgraced."      Yet    British    "fighting   blood" 
seemed  at  length  stirred  to  a  boil  by  asphyxiating-gas 
and  "Hate"  measures  against  British  officer-captives. 
A  wave  of  holy  rage  swept  over  the  country.    Those 
who  had  advocated  the  use  of  kid  gloves  against  an 
enemy  which  fought  with  brass  knuckles  and  poison 
found  their  views  sensibly  less  popular.    Britain  was 
waking  at  last  to  the  realization  which  even  the  Belgian 
atrocities,  "Zeppelin  murder"  and  the  "Scarborough 
baby-killers"  had  not  fully  aroused — that  her  high- 
minded  "sporting  ethics"  were  lamentably  out  of  place 
in  war  with  a  foe  which  believed  in  ruthless  "Fright- 
fulness."  The  Tommies  who  died  horrible  deaths  from 
the  effects  of  German  poison  gas  and  the  officers  who 
languished  in  burglars'   cells  because  martyrs   in  a 


THE   NEW   ENGLAND  353 

worthy  cause — their  anguish  convinced  England  al- 
most against  her  will  that  the  German  was  the  most  fe- 
rocious, pitiless  and  unconscionable  enemy  who  had 
ever  engaged  in  the  noble  calling  of  arms. 

While  this  healthy  conviction  was  soaking  into  Brit- 
ain's sluggish  consciousness,  the  crowning  infamy  of 
the  Lusitania  massacre  was  committed.  The  cup  of 
indignation,  already  full  to  the  brim,  now  overflowed. 
Demand  for  vengeance,  in  the  form  of  a  campaign 
against  the  Germans  to  be  waged  with  resolution  and 
force  more  destructive  than  any  previous  effort,  was 
universal.  There  must  be  no  more  temporizing,  no 
more  half  measures,  no  more  vacillation  and  procras- 
tination. Recruiting  enjoyed  a  fresh  spurt,  a  response 
to  the  lurid  posters  headed  "Remember  the  Lusitania!" 
and  reproducing  the  verdict  of  the  Queenstown  coro- 
ner's jury 

"that  this  appalling  crime  was  contrary  to  interna- 
tional law  and  the  conventions  of  all  civilized  nations, 
and  we  therefore  charge  the  officers  of  the  said  sub- 
marine, the  Emperor  and  Government  of  Germany, 
under  whose  orders  they  acted,  with  the  crime  of  wilful 
and  wholesale  murder  before  the  tribunal  of  the  civ- 
ilized world." 

"It  is  your  duty,"  the  poster  added,  "to  take  up  the 
Sword  of  Justice  to  avenge  this  devil's  work.  EN- 
LIST TO-DAY!" 

The  Lusitania  horror  unchained  the  mob  spirit  from 
Land's  End  to  John  o'  Groat.  Uninterned  Germans, 
who  were  still  at  large  in  their  thousands,  were  the 


354  THE   ASSAULT 

victims  of  rioters'  fury  in  London  and  the  big  pro- 
vincial towns,  and  the  Home  Office  was  forced  by 
irate  public  opinion  to  place  barbed-wire  around  all  the 
"enemy  aliens"  not  already  in  captivity.  Simultaneously 
the  demand  went  forth  that  the  pampering  of  German 
prisoners  of  war  in  palatial  manor-houses  like  Doring- 
ton  Hall  should  give  way  to  rigor  more  suitable  for 
men  condemned  henceforth  to  be  known  as  Huns.  The 
Lusitania's  aftermath  was  accompanied  by  ample  proof 
that  the  bulldog  was  no  longer  curled  up  on  the  hearth- 
rug as  unconcernedly  as  he  had  been  throughout  the 
winter  and  spring.  He  was  showing  his  teeth,  and  he 
was  snarling.  He  meant  business  now.  There  had 
been  enough  of  Queensbury  rules,  Hurlingham  ethics 
and  Crystal  Palace  niceties  in  dealing  with  the  Ger- 
mans. They  had  served  notice  to  Humanity  that  it 
had  no  laws  which  the  German  army  and  navy  felt 
bound  to  respect.  Englishmen  said  to  themselves: 
"So  be  it."    Then  they  rolled  up  their  sleeves. 

Thus  was  Britain  ringing  with  righteous  wrath  in 
the  middle  of  May,  1915,  when  what  I  venture  to  dig- 
nify as  the  turning-point  of  the  war  arrived:  the  ex- 
posure by  Lord  Northcliffe's  newspapers  of  what  was 
henceforth  to  be  known  as  "the  shells  tragedy." 
Northcliffe  himself  had  recently  been  the  guest  of  Sir 
John  French  at  the  front.  Still  more  lately  the  mili- 
tary critic  of  The  Times,  Lieutenant-Colonel  Charles 
Repington,  had  visited  British  Field  Headquarters  un- 
der the  same  auspices.  There  they  were  told  the  truth 
about  Neuve  Chapelle.  It  was  a  simple  story.  The 
British  army  had  essayed  to  smash  through  the  Ger- 
man lines,  hopelessly  short  of  the  right  kind  of  ammu- 
nition— high  explosive  shells.    Batteries  of  artillery, 


THE   NEW   ENGLAND  355 

often  on  the  threshold  of  decisive  victory,  found  them- 
selves suddenly  starved  of  the  only  sort  of  shell  which 
could  possibly  blast  a  way  through  the  concrete  and 
barbed-wire  of  the  enemy's  entrenchments.  What 
happened  at  Neuve  Chapelle — a  terribly  heavy  loss  of 
British  life  with  nothing  like  compensatory  results — 
would  inevitably  happen  again  when  the  British  army 
was  called  upon  to  attack.  It  would  simply  be  sen- 
tenced to  death  and  defeat.  Sir  John  French  had  been 
provided  with  shrapnel  which  was  good  enough  to 
smash  the  Boers,  but  he  was  criminally  ill-equipped 
with  the  shells  which  alone  were  capable  of  demolish- 
ing the  elaborate  German  defensive  arrangements  and 
enabling  the  British  infantry  to  advance  with  a  fighting 
chance  of  success.  If  the  army  was  not  to  be  con- 
demned to  inglorious  impotence  or  annihilation,  it  had 
to  be  provided  forthwith  with  high-explosive  ammuni- 
tion on  an  immense  and  unceasing  scale.  The  British 
Commander-in-Chief  declined,  in  effect,  to  assume  fur- 
ther responsibility  for  the  fate  of  the  campaign  in 
Flanders  unless  there  was  sweeping  and  instant  reme- 
dial action  by  the  War  Office. 

On  May  14  Lieutenant-Colonel  Repington,  in  a  dis- 
patch to  The  Times  from  "Northern  France,"  which, 
like  other  news  from  the  field,  passed  the  Censor  at 
Headquarters  before  transmission  to  England,  declared 
that  "the  want  of  an  unlimited  supply  of  high  explosive 
was  a  fatal  bar  to  our  success."  Describing  an  attack 
which  had  collapsed  for  the  same  reason  that  the  of- 
fensive at  Neuve  Chapelle  had  failed,  Repington 
wrote : 

"We  found  the  enemy  much  more  strongly  posted 


356  THE   ASSAULT, 

than  we  expected.  We  had  not  sufficient  high  explo- 
sive to  level  his  parapets  to  the  ground  after  the  French 
practice,  and  when  our  infantry  gallantly  stormed  the 
trenches,  as  they  did  in  both  attacks,  they  found  a 
garrison  undismayed,  many  entanglements  still  intact, 
and  maxims  on  all  sides  ready  to  pour  in  streams  of 
bullets.  We  could  not  maintain  ourselves  in  the 
trenches  won,  and  our  reserves  were  not  thrown  in 
because  the  conditions  for  success  in  an  assault  were 
not  present. 

"The  attacks  were  well  planned  and  valiantly  con- 
ducted. The  infantry  did  splendidly,  but  the  condi- 
tions were  too  hard. 

"On  our  side  we  have  easily  defeated  all  attacks  on 
Ypres.  The  value  of  German  troops  in  the  attack  has 
greatly  deteriorated,  and  we  can  deal  easily  with  them 
in  the  open.  But  until  we  are  thoroughly  equipped 
for  this  trench  warfare,  we  attack  under  grave  disad- 
vantages. The  men  are  in  high  spirits,  taking  their  cue 
from  the  ever-confident  and  resolute  attitude  of  the 
Commander-in-Chie  f . 

"If  we  can  break  through  this  hard  outer  crust  of  the 
German  defenses,  we  believe  that  we  can  scatter  the 
German  Armies,  whose  offensive  causes  us  no  concern 
at  all.  But  to  break  this  hard  crust  we  need  more  high 
explosive,  more  heavy  howitzers,  and  more  men.  This 
special  form  of  warfare  has  no  precedent  in  history. 

"It  is  certain  that  we  can  smash  the  German  crust  if 
we  have  the  means.  So  the  means  we  must  have,  and 
as  quickly  as  possible." 

By  way  of  illustrating  what  British  guns  could  do, 
if  sufficiently  numerous  and  adequately  fed,  Repington 


THE    NEW    ENGLAND  357 

told  how  the  French  "by  dint  of  the  expenditure  of 
276  rounds  of  high  explosive  per  gun  in  one  day,  lev- 
eled with  the  ground  all  the  German  defenses,  except 
the  villages."  He  left  no  doubt  that  until  Sir  John 
French's  artillery  could  attack  under  similar  condi- 
tions, British  hopes  of  effective  cooperation  with 
Joffre's  army  were  futile.  The  Times  critic's  plain- 
spoken  observations,  which  bore  the  unmistakable  im- 
print of  "inspiration"  from  British  Headquarters,  star- 
tled the  nation.  They  could  hardly  have  been  more 
suggestive  if  the  Commander-in-Chief  himself  had 
gone  to  the  country  and  proclaimed  the  facts.  Indeed, 
if  others  had  not  promptly  done  so,  I  have  reason  to 
believe  that  Sir  John  French  would  not  have  shrunk 
from  that  very  task.  No  one  had  so  direct  and  per- 
sonal a  reason  for  taking  the  bull  by  the  horns,  for  if 
the  British  campaign  were  to  degenerate  from  futility 
into  fiasco,  the  odium  would  necessarily  fall  upon  its 
field  chieftain.  History  will  hardly  condemn  him  for 
resolving  that  the  blame  should  be  placed  where  it 
belonged,  if,  as  may  well  have  been  the  case,  inspira- 
tion of  the  impending  public  exposure  emanated  from 
him. 

On  May  21  Lord  Northcliffe's  Daily  Mail — his 
critics  are  fond  of  calling  The  Times  the  "penny  edi- 
tion" of  The  Daily  Mail — opened  a  ruthless  fire  on 
Lord  Kitchener,  the  Secretary  of  State  for  War,  as 
the  man  directly  responsible  for  the  high-explosive 
famine  which  was  paralyzing  British  military  ef- 
fort. England  was  plastered  with  flaming  placards 
reading:  "Kitchener's  Tragic  Blunder."  With  the 
journalistic  instinct  for  a  catch-phrase,  Northcliffe 
christened  the  situation  "The  Shells  Tragedy."     He 


358  THE   ASSAULT 

hammered  home  mercilessly  the  theory  that  England 
must  hold  to  accountability  the  man  whom  the  country 
had  entrusted  with  practically  autocratic  control  of  the 
War  Office.  He  insisted  that  Kitchener  could  not  take 
shelter  behind  a  brilliant  past.  It  was  a  bold  throw  for 
the  Bonaparte  of  British  newspaperdom.  He  was  not 
only  assailing  the  man  whom  he  himself  had  helped 
to  elevate  to  the  War  Secretaryship;  he  was  at- 
tacking the  national  idol.  To  the  overwhelming  ma- 
jority of  Englishmen,  as  I  have  already  pointed  out, 
the  name  of  Kitchener  spelled  confidence.  Next  to 
the  Fleet,  he  represented  the  country's  greatest 
war  asset.  Whenever  Britons  doubted  whether  the 
course  of  events  was  leading  to  victory,  they  thought 
of  the  navy  and  of  Kitchener,  and  were  of  stout 
heart.  Northcliffe  knew  and  understood  all  this — 
none  better.  But  he  said  to  himself  that  the  relief  of 
the  shells  crisis  was  of  vastly  more  moment  than  the 
prestige  of  a  national  idol;  that  if  the  vital  interests  of 
the  country  demanded  the  dragging  of  Kitchener  from 
his  pedestal,  there  must  be  no  hesitation  in  performing 
that  unpleasant  task.  In  an  editorial  article  which 
stirred  Great  Britain  to  its  uttermost  foundations,  The 
Daily  Mail  went  full  tilt  to  the  issue.  It  reminded 
Englishmen  that  Lord  Kitchener  loomed  large  in  the 
public  eye  primarily  as  an  organizer  of  victory  against 
the  Sudanese  and  as  a  man  who  had  "helped"  Lord 
Roberts  in  South  Africa,  though  (it  recalled)  there 
were  men  who  knew  Roberts'  private  opinions  of 
Kitchener's  achievements  in  the  Boer  campaign. 
Kitchener  had  also  been  Commander-in-Chief  in  India 
and,  until  the  outbreak  of  war,  was  engaged  in  the 
comparatively   easy    task   of   running  the   Egyptian 


THE    NEW    ENGLAND  359 

machine,  whose  wheels  had  been  so  well  oiled  by  Lord 
Cromer.  Northcliffe  was  well  aware  that  Kitchener, 
owing  to  his  long  absence  in  the  East,  where  he  had 
spent  the  greater  part  of  his  life,  was  not  in  touch  with 
the  democracy  at  home,  nor  had  Lord  Kitchener  ever 
pretended  to  any  such  knowledge.  The  Daily  Mail  ad- 
mitted all  these  things  and  declared  moreover  that  it 
was  fair  to  Kitchener  to  say  that  he  had  been  thrust  at 
a  moment's  notice  into  a  position  of  immense  difficulty. 
No  longer  in  his  first  youth,  and  more  than  twice  the 
age  of  successful  military  commanders  of  one  hundred 
years  ago,  Kitchener  had  been  put  in  charge  of  the 
raising,  drilling,  clothing,  equipping,  arming,  feeding 
and  fighting  of  an  army  which  had  to  be  manufactured 
at  a  speed  unprecedented  in  the  history  of  the  world. 
Kitchener,  though  not  essentially  a  good  organizer,  was 
a  man  of  enormous  driving-power.  His  talents  in  that 
respect  had  stood  him  in  good  stead  so  far  in  the  war. 
With  the  aid  of  a  gigantic  advertising  campaign,  he  had 
accomplished  marvels  in  the  direction  of  raising  a  vol- 
unteer army ;  but  "the  shells  tragedy"  was  thunderous 
proof  that  the  Secretary  for  War  had  bitten  off  more 
than  he  could  chew.  Unless  things  were  to  go  from 
bad  to  worse,  the  all-important  question  of  providing 
munitions  must  be  taken  from  Kitchener's  overbur- 
dened shoulders  and  transferred  to  those  of  men  better 
equipped  in  respect  of  time,  temperament  and  training, 
to  deal  with  it.  The  Northcliffe  revelations  lost  none 
of  their  sensationalism  in  presence  of  Mr.  Asquith's 
solemn  assurances  at  Newcastle,  barely  three  weeks 
previous,  that  Britain's  munition  supply,  as  well  as 
that  of  her  Allies,  was  entirely  adequate. 

If  Northcliffe  had  suddenly  proposed  the  abdication 


360  THE   ASSAULT 

of  the  Sovereign,  or  the  demolition  of  St.  Paul's  Cathe- 
dral, or  the  proclamation  of  a  Republic,  nothing  could 
have  been  more  cyclonic  in  its  effect  than  The  Daily 
Mail's  imperious  demand  for  the  curtailment  of 
Kitchener's  supreme  authority  at  the  War  Office,  be- 
cause he  had  "blundered"  with  the  army's  ammuni- 
tion. At  the  Stock  Exchange  and  on  the  Baltic  (the 
shipping  mart)  copies  of  all  the  Northcliffe  papers 
were  ceremoniously  burnt.  Town  councils  held  indig- 
nation meetings,  to  discuss  the  advisability  of  banning 
them  from  the  public  reading-rooms.  Super-patriots 
and  Hide-the-Truth  zealots  rushed  to  their  newsdeal- 
ers and  canceled  their  subscriptions  to  The  Times,  The 
Daily  Mail  and  other  Northcliffe  organs.  Rival  pub- 
lishers went  so  far  as  to  suggest  that  Northcliffe  and 
his  editorial  staff  should  be  lined  up  in  front  of  a  fir- 
ing-squad and  shot  for  high  treason.  Wherever  one 
went,  one  encountered  the  most  violent  abuse  of  the 
journalist  who  had  dared  to  sling  mud  at  the  great 
soldier  who  was  the  incarnation  of  the  nation's  hopes 
and  to  write  "Failure"  next  to  his  magic  name.  Punch 
epitomized  national  sentiment  in  a  cartoon  showing 
John  Bull  patting  Kitchener  on  the  shoulder,  trampling 
a  Daily  Mail  under  foot,  and  saying : 

"If  you  need  assurance,  Sir,  you  may  like  to  know 
that  you  have  the  loyal  support  of  all  decent  people  in 
this  country." 

But  Northcliffe,  who  possesses  those  valuable  twin 
assets  of  the  true  journalist,  an  elephantine  hide  and 
utter  fearlessness,  returned  to  the  attack,  day  after 
day.    He  never  let  up.    The  "shells  tragedy,"  though 


THE   NEW   ENGLAND  361 

Liberal  organs  were  reluctant  to  admit  it,  dealt  the 
Asquith  Liberal  Government  a  body  blow.  It  was 
reeling  from  the  effects  of  still  another  revelation. 
Lord  Fisher,  "Fighting  Jack,"  the  First  Lord  of  the 
Admiralty,  tendered  his  resignation.  He  refused 
longer  to  hold  office  under  the  temperamental  Mr. 
Winston  Churchill  or  even  under  a  government  to 
which  that  impetuous  young  statesman  belonged.  The 
public  learned  that  Fisher  had  not  acquiesced  whole- 
heartedly in  Mr.  Churchill's  schemes  for  limiting  the 
Dardanelles  campaign  to  a  purely  naval  operation.  Eng- 
land was  now  seething  with  unrest.  The  political  posi- 
tion was  chaotic.  Acrimonious  debate  in  Parliament  on 
the  shells  question  was  inevitable.  For  weeks  previ- 
ous there  had  been  demands  from  many  quarters  that 
the  conduct  of  the  war  should  be  transferred  from  a 
purely  Party  Government  to  the  hands  of  a  "National 
Cabinet"  of  all  political  complexions.  Mr.  Asquith 
yielded  to  the  inevitable.  Before  The  Daily  Mail's  ex- 
posure of  "Kitchener's  Tragic  Blunder"  was  a  week 
old,  the  reconstruction  of  the  Cabinet  into  a  "Coali- 
tion" Administration  was  in  full  progress.  North- 
cliffe's  papers  were  still  being  burnt  in  public  places, 
but  he  had  won  a  victory  for  England  for  which,  as 
she  lives,  she  will  yet  come  to  acclaim  his  name.  The 
completion  of  the  Coalition  Ministry  was  announced 
on  June  11.  Lord  Kitchener  remained  Secretary  of 
War,  but  a  "Ministry  of  Munitions,"  which  took  shells 
and  other  sinews  of  war  out  of  Kitchener's  hands,  was 
created,  and  the  "hustler"  of  the  Cabinet,  Lloyd- 
George,  was  entrusted  with  its  organization  and  ad- 
ministration.   Northcliffe  had  carried  his  point. 

The  war  has  not  been  prolific  in  England  of  "big 


362  THE   ASSAULT 

men."  Barring,  perhaps,  Joffre  and  Hindenburg,  it 
has  produced  none  anywhere.  But  I  venture  that  far 
into  the  realm  of  prophecy  to  predict  that  the  recorder 
of  the  life  and  times  of  Great  Britain  in  the  crucible 
which  was  1915  will  pay  no  mean  tribute  to  the  news- 
paper proprietor  who  risked  prestige  and  power  for 
the  sake  of  that  most  prodigious  of  all  tasks — stuffing 
unpalatable  truth  down  British  throats.  Northcliffe's 
actual  methods  in  the  performance  of  the  deed  may 
have  been  debatable.  His  motives  were  certainly  be- 
yond question,  and  they  will,  undoubtedly,  appear  in 
true  perspective  in  the  impartial  light  of  history.  He 
is  not  offended  when  people  detect  Napoleonic  flashes 
in  his  impetuous  eccentricities,  and  he  would  be  the 
last  man  in  the  world  to  deny  that  his  brand  of  genius 
is  entirely  devoid  of  defects,  as  it  assuredly  is  not. 
Northcliffe  has  been  held  up  to  public  obloquy 
as  hardly  any  man  of  his  generation  ever  was 
before  him  and  has  even  been  charged  with  being 
in  "German  pay."  But  he  has  lived  to  see  the 
ripening  of  the  fruits  of  his  sensational  crusade:  the 
British  munitions  output  has  been  quadrupled  since  the 
Stock  Exchange  first  burnt  The  Daily  Mail.  Lloyd- 
George,  at  the  Ministry  of  Munitions,  has  gathered 
round  him  the  strongest  company  of  business  and  sci- 
entific brains  that  was  ever  applied  to  any  Government 
department  in  England.  One  million  men  and  women, 
in  more  than  two  thousand  "controlled"  establish- 
ments, are  turning  out  days,  nights  and  Sundays  the 
shells  with  which  the  British  army,  early  or  late,  is 
going  to  cleave  its  way  to  victory.  In  the  great  fighting 
around  Loos  at  the  end  of  September,  when  the  French 
and  the  British  between  them  fired  65,000,000  shells 


THE   NEW   ENGLAND  363 

in  seventy-two  hours,  there  was  no  shortage  of  the 
wherewithal,  the  lack  of  which  turned  Neuve  Chapelle 
into  a  "victory"  which  Britain  had  been  better  without. 
A  prodigious  amount  of  high  explosive  was  necessary 
to  wreck  the  Germans'  first  defensive  lines  in  Artois, 
but  still  the  supply  was  not  exhausted.  When  the  cease- 
fire was  sounded,  the  British  commanders  found  that 
they  had  on  hand  a  great  deal  more  ammunition  than 
they  expected,  and  in  certain  departments  there  was 
actually  a  greater  quantity  ready  for  the  gunners  at 
the  end  of  the  struggle  than  at  the  beginning.  Mr. 
Lloyd-George  received  and  was  entitled  to  the  chief 
glory  for  that  splendid  assurance  that  there  would  be 
no  more  Neuve  Chapelles.  But  I  am  sure  that  the  lit- 
tle Welshman  who  has  accomplished  the  miracle  of 
"speeding  up"  Britain  would  be  the  first  to  acknowl- 
edge that  The  Daily  Mail,  though  its  circulation  is 
150,000  less  than  it  was  in  May,  can  not  be  robbed  of 
the  honor  that  belongs  to  it  for  having  torn  the  scales 
from  England's  eyes  on  the  "shells  tragedy." 

Previous  to  the  "shells  tragedy,"  I  do  not  think  it 
will  be  possible  for  even  the  friendliest  chroniclers  to 
record  that,  with  the  single  exception  of  the  magnifi- 
cent rush  to  arms  of  her  upper  and  middle  classes, 
Great  Britain  had  given  a  particularly  flattering  ac- 
count of  herself  in  the  searching  test  of  war.  I  do 
not  refer,  of  course,  to  the  accomplishments  of  the 
army  and  navy.  British  soldiers  and  sailors  need  no 
encomium  at  my  hands.  The  Trojan  heroism  of  the 
army,  despite  its  lack  of  sweeping  victory,  will  enrich 
military  history  for  all  time.  The  silent  effectiveness 
of  the  navy,  with  its  vindication  of  Admiral  Mahan's 
theories,  is  the  marvel  of  the  war.    I  am  referring  to 


364  THE   ASSAULT 

the  conduct  of  the  British  who  have  not  been  in  the 
war  as  combatants — to  the  moral  psychic  aspect  of 
life  in  this  country  during  the  year  of  travail.  That  is 
why  I  call  the  Lusitania  a  blessing  in  disguise,  just 
as  I  sometimes  felt  that  a  landing  of  a  German  force 
on  the  British  coasts,  had  it  only  taken  place  soon 
enough,  might  have  proved  the  most  practically  bene- 
ficial tonic  to  the  British  war  spirit  which  could  have 
been  conceived.  Something  was  needed  to  bring  the 
war  home  to  Englishmen.  The  Lusitania  partially 
served  the  purpose. 

The  renaissance  set  in  with  the  dawn  of  summer. 
Events  did  not  give  recruiting  quite  that  "boom"  which 
was  expected,  but  the  national  sobering  process  which 
ensued  was  more  than  a  compensating  factor. 
Lloyd-George,  inevitable  and  irrepressible,  invented 
the  doctrine  that  "silver  bullets"  (money)  and  Ger- 
many's "potato-bread  spirit"  (economy)  were  now  as 
urgently  necessary  for  Britain  to  win  as  high-explo- 
sives with  which  to  kill  Germans.  Only  a  few  weeks 
before  becoming  "Shells  Minister"  and  while  still 
Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer,  Lloyd-George  introduced 
the  second  War  Budget,  which  gave  Britons  a  stagger- 
ing idea  of  what  killing  Germans  meant  in  mere  lucre. 
It  was  costing  $15,000,000  a  day  then — in  May — and 
the  scale  was  crescendo,  not  diminuendo.  Lloyd-George 
declared  that  the  nation's  bills  could  not  be  met  unless 
the  country  went  over,  horse,  foot  and  dragoon,  to  the 
Simple  Life.  The  Prime  Minister  seconded  his  appeal 
for  the  radical  regeneration  of  British  life — a  conver- 
sion from  recklessness  to  Spartanism — with  some  elo- 
quent figures.  In  a  "keynote  speech"  at  Guildhall,  Mr. 
Asquith  declared  that  "waste,  on  the  part  either  of  in- 


THE   NEW   ENGLAND  365 

dividuals  or  of  classes,  which  is  always  foolish  and 
shortsighted,  is  in  these  times  nothing  short  of  a  na- 
tional danger."  The  United  Kingdom's  annual  in- 
come, the  Premier  explained,  was  between  $11,250,- 
000,000  and  $12,000,000,000.  Annual  expenditure 
aggregated  about  $10,000,000,000.  The  country, 
therefore,  saved  under  normal  conditions  between  $1,- 
250,000,000  and  $2,000,000,000.  But  the  necessities 
of  "our  seven  wars"  (in  different  parts  of  the  hemi- 
sphere) required  Britons  to  save  about  two  and  a  half 
times  what  they  customarily  put  away.  They  needed 
to  store  up  $5,000,000,000  instead  of  $2,000,000,000 
a  year.  In  other  words,  they  must  reorganize  their 
scheme  and  standards  of  living — and  of  spending — 
so  that  they  saved  $50  for  every  $20  saved  in  the 
past.  In  no  other  conceivable  way,  said  the  Prime 
Minister,  could  Great  Britain  shoulder  the  burden  of 
a  struggle  already  costing  her  at  the  rate  of  $5,475,- 
000,000  a  year.  To  ask  the  notoriously  most  extrava- 
gant people  in  Europe — the  returns  from  the  United 
States  are  not  in  yet — to  "economize"  on  the  Brobding- 
nagian  lines  which  these  figures  conjured  up  was  a  very 
tall  order,  indeed. 

But  the  gassed  Tommies  back  from  the  trenches  and 
the  widows  and  the  orphans  manufactured  by  the  Lusi- 
tania  and  the  impregnability  of  the  German  lines  were 
uppermost  in  England's  mind,  and  she  set  her  jaw  to 
the  inevitable.  The  Simple  Life  did  not  find  itself 
among  friends  in  the  midst  of  a  race  which  believes 
in  a  maximum  of  servants  on  a  minimum  of  income; 
whose  very  homes  and  kitchens  are  the  paradise  of 
wasters ;  which  venerates  leisure,  week-ends,  "good  ad- 
dresses" and  "parties" ;  which  left  the  omnibuses  to  the 


366  THE   ASSAUL'i 

crowd  and  scorned  anything  beneath  the  rank  of  a  taxi 
for  the  truly  well-born ;  which  would  gladly  go  poor  for 
a  week  for  the  sake  of  a  Saturday  lunch  at  the  Picca- 
dilly grill  and  a  supper  at  the  Savoy,  with  a  theater  and 
a  music-hall  between,  and  Murray's  afterward  till 
dawn;  which,  while  never  ostentatious,  was  addicted 
to  luxury;  which  worshiped  golf,  football,  bridge  and 
horse-racing  like  liberty  itself,  and  which  drank  like 
sailors  all. 

But  the  ax  of  retrenchment  was  infinitely  preferable 
to  the  sword  of  Damocles.  Lords  and  ladies,  "gentry" 
and  common  folk,  prepared  to  make  the  best  of  it. 
Prohibition,  mainly  to  enforce  sobriety  on  the  work- 
ing classes,  was  considered  by  the  Government,  but 
not  for  long,  for  there  was  a  mighty  howl  from  the 
"trade"  and  from  its  bibulous  votaries,  who  in  Eng- 
land include  both  sexes,  all  classes  and  nearly  every 
age.  Restriction,  not  prohibition,  was  adopted  as  a 
compromise.  In  the  "munition  areas"  the  saloons  were 
closed  at  the  hours  when,  in  former  times,  working 
men  were  most  inclined  to  squander  their  wages 
on  debilitating  ale  and  alcohol.  Everywhere  a  "No- 
drinks-before-10-A.-M."  decree  was  promulgated,  and, 
simultaneously,  it  became  a  misdemeanor  for  a  res- 
taurant, saloon,  hotel,  bar  or  even  a  private  club  to 
dispense  liquor  after  ten  o'clock  at  night.  Clubland  in 
Pall  Mall,  St.  James's  and  Piccadilly  groaned,  and 
there  was  gnashing  of  teeth  among  the  "nuts"  (young 
bloods)  and  the  ladies  of  the  chorus.  But  people  found 
they  had  more  money  for  bread  and  butter,  potatoes, 
vegetables  and  meat,  which  were  costing  semi-famine 
prices  as  it  was,  and  there  were  fewer  besot  wrecks  of 
women  in  the  Strand,  and  almost  no  intoxicated  men 


THE   NEW   ENGLAND  367 

in  khaki.  War  manifestly  had  its  blessings,  too.  One 
met  unfamiliar  people  in  the  plebeian  motor-buses, 
who  at  first  wrapped  their  evening-coats  exclusively 
and  close  around  them,  for  contact  with  the  common 
clay  was  still  new  and  strange.  It  became  positively 
fashionable  to  be  a  cheese-parer.  You  were  no  longer 
considered  "bad  form"  if  you  went  straight  home  from 
the  theater,  and  confessed  why.  If  my  lady  of  May- 
fair  did  not  close  up  her  house  in  South  Audley  Street 
or  Park  Lane  altogether,  to  live  in  "chambers"  or 
some  cozy  country  cottage,  which  was  also  cheap,  she 
at  least  shut  up  the  drawing-rooms,  dispensed  with  a 
maid  or  two,  cut  out  the  most  expensive  courses  at 
her  dinners,  when  she  gave  any  at  all,  and  didn't  mind 
if  her  guests  turned  up  in  day  clothes. 

The  plutocratic  peer  who  ordinarily  maintained  a 
"place"  at  the  seashore,  an  estate  in  Middlesex  or 
Devon,  and  a  town-house  in  Berkeley  Square  had 
probably  long  ago  handed  over  the  "place"  and  the 
estate  for  military  hospital  purposes — hardly  a  man- 
sion or  manor-house  in  England  to-day  is  devoted  to 
any  other  use — and  now  retrenchment  became  for  him 
the  order  of  the  day  in  London,  too.  His  stable  of 
thoroughbreds  almost  vanished  in  the  early  days  of 
the  war,  for  the  needs  of  the  cavalry  and  the  artillery 
were  insatiable  and  undiscriminating,  and  now  his  ga- 
rage was  down  to  a  war  basis — the  most  plebeian  car 
he  ever  drove ;  the  others  were  in  army  service  either  in 
England  or  "somewhere  in  France."  Sackville  Street 
and  Albemarle  Street,  Bond  Street  and  Regent  Street, 
where  smart  clothes  and  other  expensive  trinkets  for 
men  and  women  were  formerly  sold,  became  deserted. 
Men's  tailors  displayed  nothing  but  khaki  in  their  win- 


368  THE  ASSAULT 

dows,  and  Paquin's,  Redfern's  and  Worth's  languished 
as  if  England  were  famine-blighted.  Society  faded 
away  as  if  pestilence  had  swept  Uppertendom  into 
oblivion.  Women  of  Britain's  first  families  were  al- 
most ashamed  to  be  seen  in  anything  more  chic  than 
the  livery  of  mourning,  and  by  midsummer  of  1915 
black  was  pitiably  fashionable  and  omnipresent.  "En- 
tertaining" had  been  a  lost  art  for  months.  "Going 
in  for  it"  now  seemed  and  was  sacrilege.  Indulged  at 
all,  it  was  excusable  only  if  it  had  the  extenuating 
excuse  of  having  been  arranged,  and  then  in  the  most 
modest  of  ways,  for  one's  wounded  or  recuperating 
officer  friends,  back  from  Hell  or  on  the  eve  of  going 
there — "somewhere  in  France."  It  was  war-time  in 
England  at  last. 

If  I  have  seemed  to  emphasize  that  the  reconstruc- 
tion of  British  life,  after  bitterly  hard  knocks  on  land 
and  sea  pounded  some  realization  of  their  task's  magni- 
tude into  Englishmen's  heads,  went  on  chiefly  in  the 
upper  and  upper-middle  classes,  it  is  precisely  the  im- 
pression I  seek  to  convey.  It  is  they  alone,  to  date, 
who  have  taken  the  full  measure  of  Britain's  terrible 
emergency  and  acted  accordingly.  Even  that  state- 
ment requires  qualification,  for  the  fools'  paradise  is 
not  even  to-day  inhabited  exclusively  by  the  benighted 
lower  strata  of  the  population.  Neuve  Chapelle,  as- 
phyxiating gas  and  the  Lusitania  had  passed  into  his- 
tory a  full  month  before,  yet  there  lingers  painfully 
in  my  memory  the  recollection  of  a  country-house 
week-end  party  broken  up  because  Englishwomen  of 
"class"  objected  to  hearing  a  fellow-guest  venture 
the  opinion  that  dear  old  England  would  better 
"wake  up"  to  the  fact  that  calm  alone,  mighty  an  asset 


THE   NEW   ENGLAND  369 

as  it  was,  could  not  "march  to  Berlin"  against  an 
enemy  like  the  Germans.  These  ladies  were  interest- 
ing as  types.  Their  name  was  legion,  and  many 
of  them,  as  an  Irishman  might  say,  were  men.  Com- 
mon sense,  prized  of  Anglo-Saxon  virtues,  and  tol- 
erance, its  twin  sister,  lost  their  old-time  hold  on  many 
millions  in  these  isles  during  the  war.  The  "Anti- 
German  Union,"  which  was  founded  by  well-meaning 
noblemen  and  noblewomen  for  the  purpose  of  organ- 
izing hate  of  the  Teuton  and  all  his  works,  perhaps  set 
itself  an  unethical  goal,  but  the  psychology  at  the  bot- 
tom of  the  movement  was  wholesome;  it  was  all  to  the 
good,  because  it  was  sharpening  the  bulldog's  teeth. 
It  committed  uncouth  excesses  like  sending  interrupters 
to  the  German  Church  service  in  Montpelier  Place, 
forgetting  that  my  esteemed  friend,  the  Reverend  Mr. 
Williams,  the  Anglican  chaplain  in  Berlin,  was  never 
prevented  from  assembling  his  uninterned  flock  for 
worship  at  St.  George's  in  Montbijou-Platz.  Far 
less  excusable  than  the  "Anti-German  Union's"  super- 
patriotic  eccentricities  was  the  smug  intolerance  of 
enormous  numbers  of  British  toward  elementary 
questions  of  the  war.  They  would  hear  noth- 
ing of  the  Germans  unless  it  was  discreditable.  I 
would  write  in  my  "Germany  Day  by  Day"  column  in 
The  Daily  Mail  that  there  were  growing  indications 
(let  us  say)  that  the  enemy  was  still  at  fighting 
zenith — his  stock  of  men,  materials  and  provisions  still 
far  from  exhausted.  The  next  day's  post  would  in- 
variably bring  me  denunciatory  letters  from  anony- 
mous members  of  the  public.  I  was  "pro-German."  I 
was  "a  German  agent."  I  was  "playing  the  enemy's 
game."    Englishmen  didn't  "care  to  read  the  twaddle 


370  THE   ASSAULT 

of  a  man  who  was  still  so  enamored  of  the  Hun  capital 
where  he  so  long  lived."  And  when  I  wrote  of  Ameri- 
can exasperation  with  British  shipping  practises  in  war, 
an  English  patriot  induced  my  editor  to  print  a  letter 
in  retort,  "praying  passionately  for  preservation  from 
the  candid  friend."  Other  correspondents  did  not 
confine  their  observations  to  supplication.  They  were 
the  high  privates,  these  human  ostriches,  of  the  Grand 
Army  of  Truth-Hiders,  who,  commanded  by  great 
editors  in  Fleet  Street  and  ably  abetted  by  the  Censor- 
ship, preferred  palatable  fiction  to  iron  facts.  It  is  they 
who  kept  John  Bull  lulled  in  complacent  slumber  for 
most  of  the  first  year  of  the  war  and  are  doing  their 
diabolical  best  to  administer  sleeping-powder  even 
now. 

Yet,  by  and  large,  the  section  of  the  British  public 
which  does  its  thinking  above  its  gaiter-tops  was  effec- 
tually roused  from  its  dreams  as  Armageddon's  initial 
twelvemonth  approached  its  finish.  It  was  the  sub- 
stratum which  could  not  be  roused  from  the  stupor 
of  indifference.  The  war  had  brought  mourning  and 
desolation  to  the  upper-class  homes  of  England.  The 
havoc  wrought  in  the  ranks  of  the  peerage  and  other 
dignities  is  poignantly  summarized  in  the  new  Debrett. 
Ten  per  cent,  of  the  British  officers  who  have  died  in 
the  war  were  in  the  pages  of  Debrett' s  Peerage,  Bar- 
onetage, Knightage  and  Companionage,  and  in  the  is- 
sue for  1916,  just  published,  the  War  Roll  of  Honor 
of  the  dead  comprises  eight  hundred  names.  In  it  ap- 
pear one  member  of  the  Royal  Family — Prince  Mau- 
rice of  Battenberg;  six  peers,  sixteen  baronets,  six 
knights,  and  seven  members  of  Parliament,  one  hun- 
dred sixty- four  knights  companion,  ninety-five  sons  of 
peers,  eighty-two  sons  of  baronets,  and  eighty-four 


THE   NEW   ENGLAND  371 

sons  of  knights.  Two  successive  heirs  to  the  earldom 
of  Loudoun  fell,  and  the  death  of  Lord  Worsdey  af- 
fected the  succession  to  three  separate  peerages,  the 
earldom  of  Yarborough  and  the  baronies  of  Faucon- 
berg  and  Conyers.  Succession  has  been  unduly  pre- 
cipitated, or  the  normal  descent  changed,  in  over 
one  hundred  instances  by  the  casualties  of  the  war. 
The  peer,  the  professional  man,  or  the  merchant, 
had  had  an  almost  annihilating  blow  struck  at  his 
fortune.  Things  during  the  past  year  had  dealt 
these  classes  a  vicious  thrust.  But  working-class  and 
lower-class  Britain  were  actually  profiting  from  the 
war.  Wages  were  inordinately  high — despite  trade- 
unionism's  unceasing  clamor.  Unemployment  no  longer 
existed.  There  were  no  soup-kitchens  along  the  Em- 
bankment. The  Salvation  Army's  poor-relief  system 
was  almost  without  an  excuse.  Families  of  clerks  and 
working  men — many  thousands  of  whom  were  volun- 
teers in  Kitchener's  armies — were,  thanks  to  gener- 
ous separation  allowances  paid  by  the  War  Office,  al- 
most better  off  than  in  the  days  when  the  bread-winner 
was  at  home.  For  the  British  proletariat  Mars  seemed 
almost  a  savior.  He  had  brought  it  unwonted  pros- 
perity. The  temper  in  which  a  vast  portion  of  the 
"downtrodden"  looked  upon  their  new-born  affluence 
was  that  self-preservation,  being  the  first  law  of  na- 
ture, insistently  demanded  nothing  from  them  which 
would  precipitately  evict  them  from  Easy  Street.  The 
Grand  Fleet  protected  lower-class  England  from  the 
only  blow  which  could  conceivably  have  knocked  sense 
into  it — invasion.  As  that  did  not  and  could  not  occur, 
Shepherd's  Bush  envisaged  war  not  as  an  unmixed  evil, 
but  as  something  better,  somehow,  than  peace  had 
ever  been.    It  is  all  woefully  at  loggerheads  with  Nor- 


372  THE   ASSAULT 

man  Angell's  theories  of  the  "devastating  economic 
influence  of  war."  But  the  immutable  fact  is  that 
working-class  Britain,  despite  the  havoc  the  war  has 
played  with  trade,  incomes  and  high  finance  generally, 
finds  itself,  despite  even  the  higher  cost  of  living,  at 
least  on  as  prosperous  a  level  as  at  any  time  in  its  con- 
temporary history.  It  may  be  a  myopic  view,  but  it 
explains,  in  my  judgment,  much  of  the  proletariat's 
amazing  apathy  toward  the  crucial  national  emergency. 

The  building  of  the  New  England  is  still  in  progress. 
The  melting-pot  is  full.  Years  will  elapse  before  the 
finished  product  leaves  the  crucible.  The  process  of 
transition,  however,  has  made  enormous  strides.  Ad- 
versity is  a  wonderful  reorganizer.  The  physiognomy 
of  things  long  held  unchangeable  is  altered  almost 
beyond  recognition.  It  is  a  better  England  already, 
as  well  as  a  new  one.  Above  all,  Democracy  has  not 
failed  in  the  supreme  test.  The  spectacle  of  three  mil- 
lion men,  uncoerced,  responsive  and  responsible  to  no 
law  but  their  own  conscience,  marching  out  to  death 
and  glory  that  England  may  live,  is  a  sublime  picture, 
which  will  blot  out  and  overshadow  much  of  the  bun- 
gling and  many  of  the  disasters  and  excrescences  of 
the  past. 

If  I  have  seemed  to  dwell  with  insistence  and  even 
cynicism  upon  "British  calm"  amid  the  thunders, 
let  me  here  and  now  subscribe  unqualifiedly  to  the  view 
that  it  remains,  when  all  is  said  and  done,  a  mag- 
nificent achievement  second  only  to  the  demonstration 
of  Voluntaryism  as  a  Democracy's  first  line  of  defense. 
Britannia  will  continue  to  rule  the  waves  mainly  be- 
cause she  was  calm  when  they  surged  about  her  most 
angrily. 


CHAPTER  XXII 

QUO    VADIS? 

OCTOBER,  1915.  The  eighty-third  day  of  the 
second  year  of  war.  A  woman,  writing  in 
The  Times,  suggests  that  England  adopt  as  her  na- 
tional prayer,  "God  help  us  win  this  war."  King 
George  V,  emerging  at  length  from  the  No  Man's 
Land  of  Constitutional  Irresponsibility,  appeals,  stir- 
ringly, "to  my  people"  to  save  the  sinking  bark  of  Vol- 
untary military  service.  It  is  the  calm  before  the  Con- 
scription storm.  The  Sovereign  discourses  upon  "the 
grave  moment  in  the  struggle"  and  calls  for  "men  of 
all  classes  to  come  forward  and  take  their  share  in  the 
fight  in  order  that  another  may  not  inherit  the  free  Em- 
pire which  their  ancestors  and  mine  have  built."  The 
King  hints  at  "the  darkest  moment"  which,  from  time 
immemorial,  "has  ever  produced  in  men  of  our  race 
the  sternest  resolve." 

Britain's  horizon  is  clouded,  wherever  one  looks. 
No  forced  optimism  can  blink  iron  facts.  In  the  East, 
Russia  is  paralyzed  for  months  to  come,  even  if  not 
"crushed."  Her  fortresses,  "deemed  impregnable," 
writes  Lloyd-George  in  the  preface  of  his  compiled 
war  speeches,  "are  falling  like  sand  castles  before  the 
resistless  tide  of  Teutonic  invasion."  The  "steam- 
roller" must  go  into  winter  quarters.     In  the  West, 

373 


374  THE   ASSAULT 

the  great  Anglo-French  offensive  in  Artois  and  the 
Champagne  punctures  the  German  front  and  advances 
the  Allied  lines  two  or  three  miles.  The  German  losses 
are  her  severest  of  the  war — 140,000,  so  the  French 
say,  including  vast  heaps  of  dead,  whole  regiments  of 
maimed  and  at  least  25,000  prisoners  and  145  field- 
guns.  But  the  victory,  substantial  and  promising  as 
it  is,  has  been  dearly  bought.  The  Germans  claim  that 
the  preliminary  seventy-two-hour  bombardment  repre- 
sented an  expenditure  of  65,000,000  shells — mostly  of 
American  production,  so  allege  the  "inspired"  war-cor- 
respondents at  German  headquarters,  with  sneering 
references  to  "blood-smeared  dollars."  The  Allies' 
casualties  are  not  tabulated.  They  are  only  known  to 
be  cruelly  heavy.  Englishmen  fear  there  has  been 
another  Neuve  Chapelle.  Joffre  and  French  have  dem- 
onstrated that  the  German  front  is  not  quite  impene- 
trable. But  the  enemy,  on  his  part,  has  shown  that 
for  the  Allies  to  "break  through"  in  the  West  is  a  task 
fraught  with  peril  and  toll  sickening  to  contemplate. 

General  Sir  Ian  Hamilton,  Commander-in-Chief  at 
the  Dardanelles,  has  been  recalled  "to  report."  An- 
other British  general,  unnamed,  is  dismissed  for  hav- 
ing led  an  army  into  a  shambles  at  Suvla  Bay.  The 
campaign  in  Gallipoli  is  a  tacitly  acknowledged  failure. 
General  Sir  Charles  Monro  is  hurried  to  Turkey  to  suc- 
ceed Hamilton  and  retrieve  the  fortunes  of  an  expedi- 
tion which  has  already  cost  100,000  casualties,  a  trio 
of  battleships,  a  transport  full  of  troops,  and  heart- 
breaking incalculable.  There  are  ugly  rumors  that  the 
Allies,  facing  the  inevitable,  are  about  to  abandon  the 
ill-starred  Dardanelles  venture,  and  try  their  luck  else- 
where.    Against  the  German-led  Turks  twelve  miles 


QUO   VADIS?  375 

of  precarious  "front"  with  a  back  to  the  sea  is  all 
Anglo-Colonial-French  valor  has  been  able  to  achieve. 
But  misfortune  has  dogged  the  Allies  in  fields  remote 
from  the  actual  theaters  of  war.  While  Germanic- 
Turko  armies  have  been  wrecking  their  military  hopes 
East,  West  and  Near  East,  Allied  diplomacy  has  been 
disastrously  foiled  in  the  pivotal  Balkans.  Bulgaria, 
deemed  friendly,  though  venal,  openly  goes  over  to 
the  enemy.  Sir  Edward  Grey,  like  his  fellow- 
idol,  Kitchener,  is  under  withering  fire.  He  is 
charged  with  permitting  Berlin  to  score  a  victory  which 
might  have  been  London's  if  British  diplomacy  had 
been  characterized  by  less  tentativeness  of  policy  and 
greater  impetuosity  of  deed.  It  seems  the  old  story — 
"too  late."  "Have  we  a  Foreign  Office  ?"  bitterly  asks 
Fleet  Street.  But  the  cup  of  disappointment  is  not  full 
even  yet.  Greece,  too,  is  recreant.  She  mobilizes,  sup- 
posedly as  a  pro- Ally  counterstroke  to  the  pro-German 
Bulgarian  menace,  for  is  not  the  King  of  the  Hellenes 
bound  by  solemn  treaty  to  join  Peter  of  Serbia  in  the 
eventuality  of  attack  by  Ferdinand  of  Sofia?  But 
Downing  Street  failed  to  reckon  with  King  "Tino"  of 
Athens  and  his  Hohenzollern  consort,  the  Kaiser's  fa- 
vorite sister,  Sophia.  Premier  Venizelos,  the  Allies' 
hope,  is  forced  to  resign.  Greece  remains  "neutral,"  be- 
tween German  Charybdis  and  English  Scylla,  as  King 
Constantine  himself  describes  his  plight.  She  shuts 
her  eyes  to  the  nebulous  Allied  expeditionary  force 
landed  at  Salonica  and  "rushed"  precipitately  at  the 
eleventh  hour  to  the  relief  of  the  Serbs,  who  are 
even  now  threatened  with  annihilation  between  the 
German- Austrians  on  the  north  and  west,  and  the  back- 
stabbing  Bulgars  on  the  east.    Belgrade  falls.    Uskub 


376  THE   ASSAULT 

is  captured.  The  Salonica  line  to  Nish  is  cut.  Ger- 
many's "road  to  Constantinople"  is  open.  The  Kaiser 
can  get  there  now  before  the  Allies.  Diplomacy  grasps 
at  a  last  straw.  Cyprus,  annexed  from  Turkey  by 
Britain  early  in  the  war,  is  offered  to  Greece  if  she  will 
fling  her  army  into  the  breach.  In  Athens,  it  appears, 
dictates  of  self-preservation  govern.  Revealing  a 
highly-developed  Missourian  trait,  Greece  asks  to  be 
"shown."  By  active  operations  against  the  Germanic 
Powers  and  Bulgaria,  assisted  by  mere  promises  of 
more  Allied  reinforcements  via  Salonica  or  the  driblets 
already  sent,  Greece  fears  to  share  Belgium  and 
Serbia's  fate.  If  the  Allies  will  send  400,000  troops 
to  the  Balkans — or  about  twice  as  many  as  have  been 
pounding  fruitlessly  at  the  Dardanelles — Greece  might 
change  her  mind.  The  suggestion  inspires  little  en- 
thusiasm in  England.  Kitchener  and  French  can 
doubtless  spare  the  men.  But  the  equipment  of  an- 
other huge  British  army  for  operations  in  the  Near 
East  in  time  to  turn  the  tables  is  a  taller  order.  Mean- 
time Mackensen  and  Gallwitz  batter  their  way  across 
the  Serbian  ranges.  In  London  there  are  anxious 
doubts  whether  there  will  even  be  any  Serbian  army  to 
"relieve"  by  the  time  the  Allies  place  an  effective  res- 
cuing expedition  in  the  decisive  theater.  Serbia  begins 
to  look  uncomfortably  like  another  Belgium — Salonica 
like  ill-starred  Antwerp.  Blunder  and  procrastination 
were  ever  the  parents  of  disaster. 

So  much  for  the  military  and  political  situation, 
which  even  the  Truth-Hiders  begin  to  see  in  its  true 
colors.  But  if  things  were  "messed"  abroad — in  the 
West  and  in  the  Near  East — muddle  and  bungle  were 
even  more  rampant  at  home.     Take  the  Zeppelins. 


QUO   VADIS?  377 

They  first  visited  these  shores  in  January,  1915.  In 
October  Press  and  Parliament  commenced  for  the  first 
time  seriously  to  investigate  the  adequacy  of  Britain's 
"aerial  defenses,"  with  the  result  that  chaotic  de- 
moralization and  systemless  go-as-you-please  were 
found  to  prevail.  Sir  Percy  Scott,  the  country's  great- 
est gunnery  expert,  had  been  in  charge  of  London's 
defenses  against  the  sky-pirates,  but  it  appeared  that 
his  guns  were  ineffective,  his  gunners  untrained  for 
the  highly  specialized  feat  of  hitting  mile-high  tar- 
gets flying  in  the  dark,  and  things  in  general  unor- 
ganized and  more  or  less  futile.  The  Press  Bureau 
condescendingly  parted  with  an  abstract  story  of  the 
latest  and  most  disastrous  raid  of  all  over  "the  Lon- 
don area."  People  derived  lively  satisfaction  from 
its  disclosure  that  the  metropolis  was  "cool"  and 
unafraid  under  fire.  Only  a  few  courageous  "alarm- 
ists" read  the  signs  of  the  times  aright  and  demand 
that  some  life  and  efficiency  forthwith  be  injected  into 
the  "anti-aircraft"  department,  lest,  when  Count  Zep- 
pelin's range-finding  practise  cruises  across  London  are 
finished,  an  armada  of  German  airships  sail  across  the 
Channel  and  reduce  the  heart  of  the  Empire,  ever  calm, 
to  a  smoking  ash-heap  before  Sir  Percy  Scotts'  de- 
fense is  perfected.  There  was  anxious  talk  of  bring- 
ing over  "expert  gunners"  from  France — in  October, 
after  nearly  ten  months  and  after  twenty-five  Zeppelin 
raids  over  English  territory ! 

The  while  the  elephant-hided  Censorship,  as  if  Bri- 
tannia's troubles  were  not  all-sufficient,  insisted  upon 
making  itself  more  of  an  international  laughing-stock 
and  object  of  world  contempt  than  ever.  It  censored 
Kipling's  Recessional  in  a  battle-story  from  France. 


378  THE  ASSAULT 

It  deleted  a  quotation  from  Browning  in  another  nar- 
rative from  the  front.  It  cut  out  a  famous  war  corre- 
spondent's tribute  to  the  bravery  of  the  enemy.  It  elim- 
inated a  reference  to  Chatham,  England's  greatest  War 
Minister,  because  it  confused  him  with  the  famous 
British  naval  base  from  which  he  took  his  title.  It  re- 
fused to  let  out  a  single  notch  in  the  muzzle  it  has  at- 
tached even  to  the  benevolently  neutral  American 
Press,  as  represented  by  its  accredited  and  notoriously 
Anglophile  correspondents  in  England.  It  reveled  in 
concealment,  deception  and  grotesqueness,  though  con- 
cealing nothing  from  the  enemy  and  everything  from 
England,  deceiving  exclusively  the  British  public,  and 
making  nobody  grotesque  except  its  egregious  self. 
Calls  for  the  light  at  home,  ridicule  and  criticism  from 
abroad,  alike  left  the  Censor  unmoved.  The  sparrows 
cried  from  the  housetops  in  ever  more  insistent  accents 
that  all  was  not  well  with  England,  but  the  Censorship, 
magnificently  blind  even  to  the  Royal  pronouncement 
that  Britons  unfailingly  respond  when  the  hour  is  dark, 
maintained  imperiously  that  what  it  was  well  for  the 
country  to  know  was  for  it,  and  it  alone,  to  decide.  If 
the  British  public  were  a  transgressor,  its  way  could  not 
have  been  harder. 

Came  Mr.  Montagu,  the  Financial  Secretary  of  the 
Treasury,  the  reputed  "budget  genius"  of  the  Govern- 
ment. Britons  must  be  prepared,  he  told  them,  "during 
the  year  ahead,  to  disgorge  to  the  State  not  less  than 
one-half  of  their  entire  income,  either  in  the  form  of 
taxes  or  loans."  Lord  Reading's  borrowing  commis- 
sion to  America  was  still  on  the  water,  the  ink  on  its 
$500,000,000  "credit  loan"  in  New  York  not  yet  dry. 
"I  estimate  our  expenditure  for  the  year,"  said  Mr. 


QUO   VADIS?  379 

McKenna,  the  Finance  Minister,  in  the  House  of  Com- 
mons, at  "seven  billions,  nine  hundred  fifty  million 
dollars"  (only  he  spoke  in  pounds).  "As  our  total 
estimated  revenue,  inclusive  of  new  taxes,  is  one  billion, 
five  hundred  twenty-five  million  dollars,  the  deficit  for 
the  year  will  be  six  billion,  four  hundred  twenty-five 
million  dollars.  We  have  now  to  contemplate  a  Navy 
costing  for  the  current  year  $950,000,000,  an  Army 
costing  $3,575,000,000,  and  external  advances  to  our 
Allies  (Russia,  France,  Italy,  Serbia  and  Belgium) 
amounting  to  $2,115,000,000." 

Then  the  merciless  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer 
acquainted  Parliament  with  his  scheme  for  raising 
a  part  of  this  Brobdingnagian  revenue.  Free  trade 
must  be  partially  shelved.  There  will  be  a  revenue 
tariff  on  "luxury"  imports.  Income-tax  in  1916  will 
be  forty  per  cent,  higher  and  will  amount  altogether 
to  about  fifty  cents  on  every  five  dollars  earned.  Even 
the  man  with  $650  a  year  will  pay,  while  "plutocrats" 
with  incomes  above  that  figure  will  be  mulcted  even 
more  relentlessly.  He  of  $25,000  will  pay  $5,150,  and 
nabobs  with  $50,000,  $100,000  and  $500,000  per  an- 
num (England  has  several  in  the  latter  category)  will 
contribute,  respectively,  $12,650,  $30,150  and  $170,- 
150.  War  is  hell.  No  wonder  a  parliamentary  wag, 
on  the  day  Mr.  McKenna  introduced  "Conscription  of 
Wealth,"  interrupted  with  a  merry  "Why  don't  you 
take  it  all?" 

Up  to  December,  1915,  the  Government  had  asked 
Parliamentary  sanction  for  war  credits  aggregating 
$6,500,000,000.  But  even  this  staggering  total  (the 
war  was  now  costing  $25,000,000  a  day)  was  planned 
to  carry  the  campaign  only  up  to  the  middle  of  Novem- 


380  THE   ASSAULT 

ber.  The  $500,000,000  loan  transaction  in  the  United 
States  only  produced  funds  to  be  spent  there,  and  it  was 
but  half  of  what  was  asked.  It  only  indirectly  relieves 
the  situation  at  home.  Allowing  for  the  deficit  carried 
over  from  last  year,  the  latest  budget  proposes  taxes 
amounting  to  $1,525,000,000  and  loans  aggregating 
$6,425,000,000  for  the  fiscal  year  1915-16.  But  even 
the  most  patriotic  experts  in  Threadneedle  Street  ac- 
knowledge the  utter  impossibility  of  raising  $6,425,- 
000,000  of  genuine  money  by  public  loan  in  Britain 
per  year.  They  reluctantly  predict  that  the  Govern- 
ment will  soon  be  driven  to  extend  its  use  of  fictitious 
money  and  paper — on  the  excoriated  German  model. 
The  war  has  already  eaten  toward  the  bottom  of  the 
stockings  and  the  strong-boxes  of  Britain  where 
American  securities  are  stored. 

As  the  financier  not  only  of  her  own  colossal  re- 
quirements in  the  war,  but  as  banker  for  her  allies, 
England's  money  necessities  are  thus  seen  to  be  no  less 
urgent  than  her  need  of  men  and  munitions.  They 
comprise,  these  three  M's,  the  trilogy  on  which  the  ex- 
istence of  the  Empire  now  depends.  British  perform- 
ances in  respect  to  the  cash  sinews  of  war  have  truly 
been  on  a  monumental  scale.  History  shows  no 
parallel  for  the  achievement  of  raising  at  home  in  loans 
and  Treasury  bills  over  $5,500,000,000  without  aban- 
donment of  the  gold  standard  and  without  resort  to 
inconvertible  paper,  and  yet  keeping  British  credit  at 
an  altitude  which  gives  hard-headed  Uncle  Sam  no 
pause  in  taking  John  Bull's  I-O-U  for  another  half 
billion.  It  is  an  imperishable  tribute  to  the  stamina, 
prestige,  wealth  and  commercial  fabric  of  the  British 
Empire  and  to  the  enterprise  and  ingenuity  of  the  mer- 


Lord  Northcliffe. 


QUO   VADIS?  381 

chants,  manufacturers,  shippers,  bankers  and  traders 
who  have  made  their  islands  the  center  of  the  world's 
exchanges  and  London  the  money-market  of  the  uni- 
verse. 

But  magnificent  as  has  been  the  past,  the  financial 
future  can  not  be  viewed  except  with  anxiety.  Indebt- 
edness has  been  piled  up  sky-high — out  of  every  twen- 
ty-five dollars  spent  since  the  war  began,  at  least  twenty 
dollars  has  been  borrowed.  That  was  possible  be- 
cause of  the  superlative  excellence  of  British  credit. 
"Our  credit  is  now  almost  everything,"  explains  The 
Economist.  "It  comes  next  to  the  Navy,  and  the  two 
can  not  be  dissociated.  For  if  either  suffer,  our  food 
supplies  would  be  in  danger.  In  one  sense,  credit  is 
at  the  mercy  of  the  Government  and  of  the  Treasury, 
for  a  great  false  step  of  policy  or  continuance  in  a  false 
course  would  bring  disaster.  The  responsibility  of  the 
Prime  Minister  and  of  the  Chancellor  of  the  Ex- 
chequer and  of  the  Cabinet,  as  a  whole,  is  prodigious. 
Whatever  else  we  do,  we  must  maintain  our  financial 
equilibrium.  With  that  and  the  command  of  the  seas, 
we  can  not  be  defeated." 

Manifestly  Britain's  economic  problem  is  almost  the 
darkest  spot  on  her  overclouded  war  horizon — the 
problem  of  meeting  rising  obligations  out  of  falling 
revenue.  The  Empire  suffers  from  no  lack  of  men;  its 
physical  resources  are  well-nigh  inexhaustible.  If 
patriotism  does  not  send  them  to  the  trenches  of  their 
own  free  will  in  adequate  numbers,  they  will  be 
"fetched."  There  is  no  longer  any  question  of  short- 
age of  munitions.  England's  own  vast  industrial  plant, 
as  well  as  that  of  France,  is  now  occupied  almost  ex- 
clusively in  the  production  of  man-killing  merchandise 


382  THE  ASSAULT; 

for  the  Allies  and  is  turning  it  out  at  high  pressure.  To 
the  manufacturing  equipment  of  England  and  France 
are  harnessed,  in  addition,  German  bombs  and  Ger- 
man-incited strikes  to  the  contrary  notwithstanding, 
the  limitless  productive  facilities  of  the  United  States 
and  Canada.  Britain's  one  and  only  nightmare  is 
money,  and  its  corollary  aspects,  exchange  and  credit. 

No  estimate  has  so  far  appeared  which  fixes  the 
1916  deficit  which  England  will  have  to  meet  at  less 
than  $7,000,000,000,  based  on  a  total  war  cost  for  the 
calendar  year  of  $9,000,000,000.  How  to  grapple 
with  the  gigantic  task  conjured  up  by  such  a  prospect 
is  not  engaging  popular  attention  to  any  marked  de- 
gree, though  upon  its  solution  depends,  primarily, 
Britain's  ability  to  conquer  in  this  war  of  exhaustion. 
With  the  palpable  impossibility  of  raising  the  wind  at 
home  by  successive  new  public  loans ;  with  the  neces- 
sity to  invoke  such  heroic  measures  as  borrowing 
$500,000,000  in  America  to  bolster  up  sterling  ex- 
change and  keep  British  credit  "intact" ;  with  English- 
men sacrificing  their  enormous  holdings  of  American 
securities  for  the  same  pious  purpose ;  with  the  British 
industrial  plant  so  preoccupied  with  munitions  that  it 
can  neither,  in  accordance  with  tradition,  pay  for 
British  imports  with  British  exports  nor  increase 
British  revenue  by  the  same  token;  with  national  ex- 
penditure advancing  by  gigantic  leaps  and  national  in- 
come restricted  as  it  never  was  before;  with  all  these 
immutable  conditions  staring  at  Englishmen,  it  is  no 
wonder  that  those  of  them  who  think,  as  distinguished 
from  those  who  merely  hurrah,  contemplate  what 
looms  ahead  with  anxious  concern. 

But  admittedly  grave  as  the  future  is,  it  is  by  no 


QUO   VADIS?  383 

means  hopeless.  Britain's  plight  is  not  "desperate,"  as 
the  Germans,  seeking  to  hide  their  own,  are  so  fond 
of  making  believe.  Even  the  misgivings  of  English- 
men themselves  regarding  their  economic  situation 
would  be  promptly  and  legitimately  resolved  into  con- 
fidence if  the  community  as  a  whole  could  be  induced 
to  pull  itself  together  and  look  facts  in  the  face.  In  its 
incorrigible  disinclination  to  do  so  alone  lies  danger. 
The  British  Empire  is  not  bankrupt.  It  can  hardly 
ever  become  so.  A  recent  estimate  assessed  the  income 
of  the  Empire,  including  India,  at  something  over  the 
fabulous  sum  of  $20,000,000,000!  It  may  be  embar- 
rassed— it  is  unquestionably  that  already — just  as  the 
richest  of  men  frequently  are,  in  the  midst  of 
titanic  transactions  which  have  outrun  their  cal- 
culations. But  embarrassment  seldom  eventuates 
in  ruin,  either  for  men  or  nations,  if  they  come  to  grips 
with  it  betimes.  Thus,  disaster  can  only  follow  tribu- 
lation in  the  case  of  Britain  if  her  people,  preferring 
to  wallow  in  happy-go-lucky  nonchalance  and  drift, 
postpone  until  too  late  those  sagacious,  clean-sweep 
measures  of  reorganization  and  retrenchment  which 
alone,  in  the  opinion  of  competent  judges,  can  save  the 
situation. 

In  the  preceding  chapter  I  told  of  the  introduction  of 
the  Simple  Life,  of  the  dawn  of  the  Economy  Era  in 
war-time  England;  but  it  would  be  hyperbole  to  inti- 
mate that  it  has  been  inaugurated  on  anything  but  a 
superficial  scale.  Luxury  and  self-indulgence  are  still 
rife.  To  vast  numbers  of  people,  in  the  classes  as  well 
as  the  masses,  the  war,  far  from  oppressing  them,  has 
brought  positive  affluence,  and  with  their  new  riches 
they  have  gone  in  for  spending  instead  of  saving. 


384  THE   ASSAULT 

Spartanism  in  Britain  remains  a  good  deal  of  a  theory; 
it  has  not  become  a  condition.  While  Germany,  shut  off 
by  land  and  sea,  contrives  to  remain  at  fighting  zenith 
without  her  customary  imports  of  $2,500,000,000  a 
year  (she  calls  Jellicoe's  blockade  a  blessing  in  disguise 
because  it  has  compelled  her  to  spend  at  home  what  she 
used  to  pay  out  abroad),  England's  imports  of  such  ar- 
ticles as  oranges,  cocoa,  tea,  coffee,  tobacco,  cheese,  rice, 
meats,  pepper  and  onions  have  heavily  exceeded  her  im- 
portations of  the  same  articles  in  corresponding  peace 
periods.*  The  Prime  Minister  tells  the  country  that 
"victory  seems  likely  to  incline  to  the  side  which  can 
arm  itself  the  best  and  stay  the  longest."  Mr.  Asquith 
declares  that  "that  is  what  we  meant  to  do."  But  until, 
for  instance,  Englishmen  realize  that  by  abstaining 
from  tobacco  for  a  year,  $40,000,000  of  money  would 
be  available  for  the  smoke  of  battle;  that  if  every  man, 
woman  and  child  in  the  Kingdom  puts  away  25  cents 
a  week,  a  new  treasure  of  $600,000,000  could  be  piled 
up  for  war;  and  that  unless  waste,  extravagance  and 
slothful  habits  generally  are  banished,  by  duke  and  by 
docker,  as  if  they  were  leprous  disease,  Mr.  Asquith's 
brave  words  will  remain  a  hollow  aspiration.  They 
alone  will  not  enable  England  to  "stay  the  longest"  in 
the  world's  most  destructive  endurance  competition. 

It  is  not  change  of  governments,  but  ruthless  change 
of  system,  which  England  requires.  She  has  relegated 
a  vast  deal  since  the  cleansing  process  set  in,  in  August 
a  year  ago,  but  the  scrap-heap  clamors  for  more.    It 

*  There  are  ugly  rumors  that  Produce  Exchange  patriots  who 
burnt  The  Daily  Mail  for  exposing  the  "shells  tragedy"  are  the 
importers  of  these  excessively  large  stores  and  are  selling  them 
to  "Holland" — and  other  "neutrals"  adjacent  to  Germany  at 
exorbitant  profits. 


QUO   VADIS?  385 

cries  most  insistently  of  all  for  obliteration  of  the  fe- 
tish that  politicians,  lawyers  and  other  amateurs  are  fit 
to  conduct  a  government  engaged  in  the  most  terrible 
combat  of  human  history.  Napoleon  once  said  that  a 
nation  of  lions  led  by  a  stag  would  be  beaten  by  a 
nation  of  stags  led  by  a  lion.  Britons  claim  to  be  a 
nation  of  lions.  They  contemplate  the  first  year 
of  the  war  and  ask  if  they  are  to  continue  to  be  led 
along  the  path  of  disaster  by  stags.  The  Truth-Hiders 
quote  Lincoln  and  deprecate  "swapping  horses  while 
crossing  a  stream."  Lord  Willoughy  de  Broke  effec- 
tually disposes  of  this  "plea  for  incompetence  in  office" 
by  telling  the  House  of  Lords  that  "whether  such  a 
course  should  be  adopted  depends  on  what  sort  of  a 
horse  a  man  has  beneath  him.  If  "the  horse  is  stand- 
ing in  the  middle  of  the  stream  and  seems  as  if  he 
were  going  to  lie  down,  the  best  thing  is  to  get  an- 
other." Englishmen  admit  that  war  like  this  demands 
wholesale  reconstruction  of  national  life,  yet  their  gov- 
ernment has  substituted  spasmodic  patchwork  for  re- 
construction. Instead  of  bold  tearing-down  and  re- 
building, there  has  been  nibbling  and  tinkering,  and 
even  then,  too  late.  The  people  have  waited  for  march- 
ing orders  in  countless  directions,  but  the  Govern- 
ment band  has  played  nothing  but  a  hesitation  waltz. 
Take  the  drink  evil,  Britain's  most  malignant  ulcer. 
Russia  is  not  commonly  looked  to  for  economic  or  so- 
cial inspiration,  yet  even  she  has  wrestled  with  drink  in 
a  manner  which  puts  England  to  shame.  While  the  Czar 
was  banishing  vodka  absolutely  for  the  pestilence  that 
it  was,  England's  governors,  fearful  of  Labor  and  "the 
trade"  alike,  temporized  and  enacted  makeshifts  which 
materially  ameliorated  the  liquor  menace  without  throt- 


386  THE   ASSAULT 

tling  its  power  for  evil.  They  have  made  "treating"  a 
misdemeanor,  closed  the  saloons,  both  public  and  pri- 
vate, at  10  p.  m.,  and  restricted  the  hours  when  drink 
may  be  sold  in  London  and  the  industrial  districts.  But 
clubmen,  artisans  and  soldiers  can  get  drunk  to  their 
heart's  content  as  of  yore.  They  have  had  only  to  re- 
arrange their  bibulous  hours.  Take  the  air  defense 
muddle.  "I,  for  one,"  wrote  a  Briton  in  October,  pro- 
testing against  the  prevailing  theory  that  the  call  of 
the  hour,  in  the  midst  of  the  Zeppelin  peril  was  "cool- 
ness," "am  tired  of  being  complimented  on  the  calm- 
ness with  which  I  behave  in  the  presence  of  danger. 
It  is  no  comfort  to  me  that  my  death,  if  it  occurs,  will 
have  no  military  importance.  I  want  to  be  congrat- 
ulated not  on  the  stoicism  with  which  I  go  to  my 
funeral,  but  on  my  share  in  a  system  of  government 
which  affords  effective  protection  to  my  country." 

Nothing  could  better  stigmatize  the  epidemic  of  Self- 
Sufficiency  which,  in  the  writer's  deliberate  judgment, 
is  primarily  responsible  for  British  failures  in  the  war 
thus  far.  There  has  been  too  much  congratulation  and 
self -congratulation  on  the  sang-froid  with  which  John 
Bull  can  take  punishment.  He  is  a  mighty  gladiator, 
but  cheery  comfort  from  his  seconds  between  rounds 
has  failed  on  many  an  occasion  to  prevent  a  champion 
pugilist  from  being  knocked  out.  It  is  not  that  Eng- 
land is  incapable  of  defeating  Germany.  It  is  that 
she  seems  unwilling  to  do  so  by  throwing  into  the  bal- 
ance every  atom  of  strength  for  which  that  prodigious 
task  calls.  For  at  least  a  decade  before  1914  Britain's 
political  ostriches,  disarmament-mongers,  professional 
pacifists  and  pro-Germans  declined  to  recognize  the 
German  danger  even  when  it  was  approaching  with 


QUO  VADIS?  387 

l 

strides  so  brazen  that  almost  the  blind  could  see.  They 
preferred  the  "valor  of  ignorance,"  thought  Ballin  and 
Harnack  instead  of  Tirpitz  and  Bernhardi  typified 
Modern  Germany,  continued  to  revel  in  the  bliss  of 
contemptuous  self-confidence,  and  attempted  to  parley 
with  a  tiger  which  was  crouching  for  the  attack.  I 
enter  a  modest  claim  to  have  done  my  own  little  share 
for  eight  years  in  the  futile  work  of  arousing  Britain 
to  the  Teuton  peril.  I  refer  merely  to  my  work  at 
Berlin,  in  reporting  military  and  naval  developments — 
"Germany  laid  all  her  cards  on  the  table,"  as  Admiral 
von  Tirpitz  once  said  to  me.  When  the  crash  came, 
Englishmen  pinned  their  faith  to  their  history.  They 
were  no  match  for  "forty  years  of  preparations,"  of 
course;  but  they  always  "started  late"  and  "muddled 
through"  their  wars.  The  Crimea  began  in  terror  and 
ended  in  triumph.  The  South  African  affair  was  the 
same  sort  of  thing.  War  with  Germany  would  be  no 
different.  The  race  which  had  finished  off  Napoleon 
need  have  no  qualms  in  tackling  his  pinchbeck  suc- 
cessor. Britons  admit  that  a  year  of  war  has  dissi- 
pated nearly  all  their  comfortable  illusions,  but  signs 
are  still  wanting  that  there  is  nation-wide,  deep-seated 
realization  of  the  immensity  of  the  ordeal  and  the  di- 
mensions of  the  sacrifices  yet  to  be  faced.  On  De- 
cember 8,  1915,  when  the  war  was  sixteen  months  old, 
Admiral  Lord  Charles  Beresford  wrote  this  letter  to 
The  Times: 

"We  are  at  present  in  a  complex  tangle  of  muddle: 
and  mismanagement.  Our  military  campaigns  are  be- 
ing conducted  without  any  objective  or  plan,  Policy 
only  has  been  considered. 


388  THE   ASSAULT 

"In  war  a  policy  has  to  be  enforced  by  the  Navy 
and  Army.  The  War  Staffs  have  not  been  consulted 
as  to  whether  they  had  the  means  in  men  and  ma- 
terial for  enforcing  the  different  policies  inaugurated 
by  the  Cabinet.  Individuals  have  been  consulted ;  com- 
bined opinion  of  War  Staffs  has  not  been  sought.  The 
result  is  disaster  in  nearly  every  direction. 

"We  have  not  taken  full  advantage  of  our  mastery 
of  the  sea.  In  every  department  we  observe  doubt, 
hesitation,  and  procrastination.  War  requires  quick 
decisions  and  prompt  actions.  The  question  of  sup- 
plying recruits  for  the  Army  has  been  postponed  once, 
and  apparently  may  be  postponed  again.  Unless  a  de- 
cision is  come  to  immediately  we  shall  be  a  year  be- 
fore the  recruits  joined  under  any  new  scheme  can 
possibly  be  ready  to  take  the  field. 

"The  public  is  sick  of  the  policy  conveyed  in  the  sen- 
tence 'Wait  and  see.'  The  danger  to  the  Empire  be- 
comes more  apparent  every  day.  The  country  is  wait- 
ing for  a  strong,  clear  lead.  Our  present  methods  will 
prolong  the  war  indefinitely.  If  we  continue  hesitat- 
ing without  making  up  our  minds  on  any  single  ques- 
tion connected  with  the  war,  we  shall  plunge  straight 
into  disaster." 

I,  too,  shall  be  a  pessimist  about  England's  chances 
to  win  the  war  only  so  long  as  she  neglects  to  go  to  war. 
Mere  command  of  the  sea,  it  has  been  amply  demon- 
strated, can  not  crush  Germany.  It  can  sorely  incon- 
venience her  and  compel  her  to  live  on  the  ration  basis, 
but  it  can  not  force  what  King  George  has  called  "a 
highly  organized  enemy"  prematurely  to  make  peace. 
When  England  has  staked  her  all,  I  shall  turn  blithe 


QUO   VADIS?  389 

optimist,  for  I  believe  that  nothing  else  in  the  world 
can  overthrow  her  savagely  efficient  antagonist.  Ger- 
many has  staked  her  all.  Until  England  does  likewise, 
they  will  not  fight  on  even  terms.  When  England,  like 
Germany,  has  relentlessly  marshaled  every  tithe  of  her 
national  strength  for  war,  subordinated  all  else  to  that 
purpose,  harnessed  to  the  chariot  of  Mars  every  con- 
ceivable resource  at  her  command,  pulverized  caste  dis- 
tinctions, banned  politics  and  politicians,  and  made 
the  war  and  the  winning  of  it  the  only  thing  the  nation 
eats  for,  works  for,  dreams  of,  or  wastes  thought  upon 
— then  I  shall  feel  constrained  to  feel  assured  that  vic- 
tory will  perch,  however  distant  the  hour,  on  Liberty's 
and  not  on  Tyranny's  banners.  The  Anglo-German  en- 
durance test — into  which  the  war  will  eventually  resolve 
itself— can  have  but  one  issue.  Germans  know  that. 
Their  analytical  mind  long  ago  taught  them  that  the 
dormant  resources  of  the  British  Empire,  once 
mobilized,  would  be  invincible.  But  what  is  happening 
is  precisely  what  the  Germans  counted  upon:  the  ir- 
resolute British  habit  of  mind,  the  "too  late"  system, 
the  century-old  cult  of  comfort  and  ease,  the  "Splen- 
did Isolation"  school  of  thought,  which,  when  the 
hour  of  trial  came,  might  be  relied  upon  to  cripple  the 
effort  to  convert  latent  potentialities  into  an  incon- 
querable  organism.  History  will  have  names  for' all 
these  things.  It  will  call  them  Belgium,  Serbia,  Dar- 
danelles and  Salonica. 

The  British  people  must  triumph  over  themselves  be- 
fore they  can  break  the  Germans.  Their  inexhaustible 
moral  and  material  assets  must  be  commandeered  and 
husbanded,  if  they  are  to  accomplish  their  manifest 
destiny,  and  not  merely  be  bragged  about  in  the  clubs 


390  THE  ASSAULT 

of  Pall  Mall  and  the  ostrich-farms  of  Fleet  Street.  If 
the  world-wide  realm  on  which  the  sun  never  sets  can 
produce  armies  calculable  only  in  millions,  as  it  most 
assuredly  is  able  to  do,  let  them  come  forth,  or  be 
brought  forth.  If  the  wealth  of  the  United  Kingdom, 
India  and  the  dominions  oversea  represents  riches  un- 
matched, as  it  does,  let  it  be  lavished  exclusively  on 
war,  and  not  squandered  in  any  other  single  direction. 
If  common  sense  is  the  proudest  of  Anglo-Saxon  vir- 
tues, let  it  prevail  and  sweep  away  governments  which 
value  votes  more  than  men's  lives  and  abolish  a  Cen- 
sorship which  treats  Britons  as  if  they  were  half- 
witted. If  there  must  be  calm  at  all  costs,  let  it  be  the 
calm  of  high-pressure  effort,  and  not  the  coolness  of 
impotent  resignation  or  casual  performance.  If  faith 
must  be  placed  in  the  efficacy  of  "attrition,"  let  the 
process  of  "bleeding  Germany  white"  be  hastened  by 
British  achievements  afield,  lest  "attrition,"  when  the 
flags  are  furled,  find  the  victor  as  emaciated  as  the 
vanquished. 

I  forget  neither  Germany's  wrecked  military  hopes 
and  economic  disintegration,  nor  the  magnitude  of 
Britain's  service  and  accomplishment  thus  far.  I  re- 
gret only,  along  with  England's  other  well-wishers, 
that  her  sacrifices  have  not  resulted,  as  they  so  richly 
deserved  to,  in  advancing  the  British  cause  farther  to- 
ward the  goal.  I  can  not  help  thinking  that,  in  many 
respects,  it  is  wasted  achievement,  for  the  object  which 
England  and  her  Allies  have  set  themselves  is  not 
merely  the  pinioning  of  Germany  to  fronts  in  Russia, 
France,  Belgium  and  Greece  beyond  which  she  can  not 
thrust  herself.  I  am  not  unmindful  of  the  glorious 
response  of  Britain's  noblest  sons,  who  sleep  by  their 


QUO  VADIS?  391 

gallant  thousands  in  the  blood-manured  soil  of  France, 
Belgium,  Turkey  and  the  Balkans,  nor  of  the  Trojan 
spirit  in  which  the  women  of  the  Empire  are  giving 
their  best  and  bravest,  and  weeping  not.  I  mourn  only 
because  death  and  suffering  leave  triumph  still  so  re- 
mote. The  remorselessness  with  which  the  Reaper  has 
stalked  through  the  great  families  and  homes  of  Eng- 
land is  saddening,  yet  inspiring,  evidence  that  the  heart 
of  Britain  is  sound.  The  immortal  deeds  of  the  Gren- 
fells  and  the  O'Learys  and  of  all  the  one  hundred 
thirty  who  have  won  Victoria  Crosses  are  only  the 
outstanding  tokens  of  undying  British  heroism.  But 
if  sacrifice  is  not  to  continue  to  be  cruelly  in  vain, 
there  must  be  relentless  regeneration  of  the  purely 
material  governance  of  British  life,  even  more  destruc- 
tible of  tradition  and  institutions  than  anything  which 
has  gone  before.  Of  bulldog  British  determination 
to  fight  to  a  finish  and  to  win  there  is  no  shadow  of 
doubt.  There  is  no  Briton  worthy  of  the  name  not 
ready  to  be  beggared  to  that  end.  The  sublimity  of 
the  cause  for  which  England  is  bleeding  is  a  more  en- 
nobling incentive  than  ever,  for  it  has  come  to  com- 
prehend life  or  death  for  herself,  as  well  as  the  libera- 
tion of  Belgium.  Spirituality  has  forfeited  none  of  its 
pristine  efficacy  as  an  asset  in  war  and  bulwark  in 
stress,  but  in  our  machine-gun  era  it  must  be  backed 
by  scientific  efficiency  and  patriotism  of  deed  before 
there  can  be  imposed  upon  Germany  that  peace  which 
is  essential  not  only  to  British  security,  but  to  the 
world's  happiness. 

FINIS 


( 


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